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).