The Loveliest Woman in America: A Tragic Actress, Her Lost Diaries, and Her Granddaughter's Search for Home

by Bibi Gaston

Book Overview

In 1927, at the age of twenty-three, Rosamond Pinchot was hailed as "The Loveliest Woman in America." At thirty-three, in a sudden, shocking, and highly public act, Rosamond took her own life, setting in motion generations of confusion in the family she left behind.

Nearly seventy years after her demise, her granddaughter Bibi received a box of more than 1,500 pages of Rosamond's diaries and embarked on a seven-year journey to make sense...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060857706
• ISBN13: 9780060857707
• Release Date: June 2008
• Publisher: William Morrow & Company
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A courageous journey in the land of memoir and biography

Bibi Gaston brings together many talents...writer, landscape architect, historian, psychologist when she shares the account of her search for her grandmother Rosamund Pinchot Gaston. This is a remarkable book, evocatively written, an incredible story of lives, events, and synchronicities and that illustrate..... what is too strange to be fiction is fact. I congratulate Bibi Gaston with enthusiasm on a unique accomplishment...a courageous overlap of memoir and biography...captivating beyond words, full of history and detail. The author invited the reader to join her on a journey of discovery....I was honored to be a companion.

A book to Both Break and Mend a Heart

It might seem that most of us come from dysfunctional beginings and this author's family is no worse than many of our own memories of childhood. Perhaps that is why there is something so very touching about the method in which this book is written. There are essentially three stories here begining with Rosamund and including her son and granddaughter. There is a great deal of the life of high society in the 1920's to be found here as well as the interesting life lead by Rosamund Pinchot. However, the most poignant section deals with the author's memories of her father culminating in his death and the behavior of family members in that painful aftermath. Actually it is the way families treat one another and the legacies of that treatment, that is truly the centerpiece in this well-written book of memories. Yet, the author remains tender towards all of her closest characters and makes us want to do the same with our own life. There are deft turns of phrase to be found and some sections that you want to write down in your own diary as the truest words you have ever heard about your own self.

Loving empathy

The loveliest woman kept me up late for several evenings.... Two accomplished young women, two generations apart. Neither with much luck in romantic relationships but each laying claim to her own story. As a devourer of biographies, the new historical tidbits were rewarding by themselves - a new Eleanor Roosevelt letter (who, according to Rosamond's diaries, planted kisses on her lips) - the role of a 28 year old socialite in FDR's 1932 depression campaign - good natured gossip about the personalities and affairs of the household names of the 1920s and 30s (including the author of "Goodnight Moon"). The Pinchots and the Gastons appear to be real life examples of the American Dream gone awry as a result of a focus on material and (sometimes quirky) social success - see Fitzgerald and Wharton for the fictional examples. Since Rosamond Pinchot was a suicide at age 33, the author's search for a psychological framework for Ms. Pinchot's personality is a big part of the tale. Spontaneous nude sunbathing (as an anti-depressant?) is only one of Rosamond's impulses. In sum - thorough research combined with loving empathy. Two unfinished stories, but a satisfying artistic whole. What's not to like about this book?

an unforgettable book

"The Loveliest Woman in America" is perhaps the best book I've read in a decade. It is beautifully written and tells the generational story of two notable families. All the familial history is pulled together by the ostensible subject's granddaughter, with the starting point being her beautiful actress grandmother's suicide before she reached the age of 40. The author's search for family information reveals great sadness, missed opportunities, lost love, famous friends, accomplished family members, and emotional double-crosses that break one's heart. A big player in this book, oddly enough, is the land and remembered places ... forests, waterfalls, pools, paths, and islands in Maine. This book and the people in it will stay with you for a long time. I think Bibi Gaston is a gifted storyteller and a brave heart.

One Of The Loveliest Writers in America

Bibi Gaston is a wonderful storyteller; a careful historian; a passionate liver and lover of the natural world. She dances with words and has the guts of a burglar. The courage it took to take this journey through her family's past and across oceans, as well as generations is stunning. Her compassion and candor moved me throughout, and add to all of the above a delicious, often wry sense of humor. I learned and learned the more I read...about other eras; ; other places; about things I already knew quite a bit about; about other families and their styles and choices, and about a very contemporary, brave, vulnerable, fascinating woman, the author herself. As in so much of art, the more specific you become in your depictions, the more universal your outreach. Many, many times I thought she was writing about me...just as when you're positive the singer up on that stage is absolutely singing your story. I don't believe the devil is in the details; I think angels are...and I was personally touched by a slew of them as I read this book from cover to cover. As a landscape architect (her day job), Gaston works to bring balance back to the natural scenes where it has been disrupted. She restores a beautiful balance to a series of disrupted human scenes, by her skills of seeing, feeling and telling.