The early life of writer Susanna Moore reads like a fairy tale. Before she became the acclaimed author of nonfiction books and novels, including the 1995 erotic thriller In the Cut, she had modeled on The Tonight Show, read scripts for Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson, befriended “fairy godmothers” like Alyce Kaiser (wife of industrialist Henry Kaiser) and Joan Didion and attended dinner parties in Los Angeles with Audrey Hepburn and Christopher Isherwood. But fairy tales have their dark sides too. Violence and abuse—as well as the effects of losing her mother at a young age—temper the glamour and romanticism. Moore’s autobiography, Miss Aluminum, published in 2020, is a carefully constructed portrait of lost worlds and of a young woman trying to come to terms with her own ide...