Miss Aluminium (A sharp-edged and glittering memoir of 1970s Hollywood) - Susanna Moore

I was self-invented, adapting myself minute by minute, a girl on the run. And yes, built for speed. ''When it comes to her portrait of LA in the 1960s and ''70s, Moore gives its most famous chroniclers, Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, a run for their money'' Lucy Scholes, TLS''Tales of the Hollywood high life certainly provide giggles and glitz, though the darkness is never far from the surface'' Guardian''Even better than her fiction: a gossipy, sardonic, nonchalantly glamorous production'' The Times At seventeen, Susanna Moore left her home in Hawai''i, with no money, no belongings and no prospects. But in Philadelphia, an unexpected gift of four trunks of beautiful clothes allowed her to assume the first of many disguises.Her journey takes her from New York to Los Angeles where she becomes a model and meets Joan Didion and Audrey Hepburn. She works as a script reader for Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson, and is given a screen test by Mike Nichols.But beneath Miss Aluminium''s glittering fairytale surface lies the story of a girl''s insatiable hunger to learn. Moore gives us a sardonic, often humorous portrait of Hollywood in the seventies - and of a young woman''s hard-won arrival at selfhood.