From bashful teenager to supermodel: Susanna Moore’s fairytale memoir

There’s a kind of writing about LA that I am a sucker for. Gossipy, lyrical, with a surface of affectless simplicity but an undertow of melancholy that can be personal (bad love affairs, damaged families) or institutional (the death of old Hollywood, the birth of the new) or, best of all, both entwined. It is reserved in its affiliations, not susceptible to moral fervour, lightly amused by what it observes but not given to wisecracking (it is not Nora Ephron, who I am a sucker for but in a different way). It has the measure of the city’s miraculous lucency and compulsive self-invention.

Joan Didion did it; Eve Babitz specialised in it. It is usually written by women, and ones whose beauty puts them half inside the gilded world of celebrity while their cynical intelligence puts them half outside it. Although the matter of their beauty is rarely explicitly discussed, it’s either implicit in their stories (the interesting things that happen to them are often the kind that beauty can facilitate) or announced in cover photos (Babitz in her bangs and black bikini, cat-faced Didion simmering over a cigarette). Miss Aluminium, a memoir of Susanna Moore’s life from childhood to her early thirties, is that kind of book. I, of course, adore it.

Moore is best known for the 1995 thriller In the Cut, which by contrast is a distinctly East Coast affair, set in New York, with allusions to Henry James and with a Shirley Jackson mean streak. It’s also filthy (‘I could feel the quickening between my legs, the contracting of muscles, the belligerent glad rush of blood’), while in Miss Aluminium Moore makes constant reference to her younger self’s naivety and even prudishness. The book is, in part, an explanation of how a girl, whose limited sexual knowledge was ‘so wildly inaccurate, if not fantastical’ as to ‘cost me years of sexual pleasure’, could grow up to write one of the world’s few genuinely hot novels.