You Must Have Been So Beautiful: A Memoir
At nineteen, Liz Bell left Johannesburg with a suitcase, a marriage proposal she hadn't thought through, and an appetite for adventure.
What followed took her from apartheid-era South Africa to Canada, and eventually onto the runways of Paris, Milan and New York. She walked for Dior and Valentino, lived through the beautiful and often brutal fashion world of the 1980s, nearly died in Paris, became a mother, and ultimately built a house in British Columbia with her own hands.
Years later, a battered shoebox of letters brought that young woman back to life. Written from hotel rooms, borrowed apartments and whatever scraps of paper were at hand, the letters became the thread through a memoir about ambition, marriage, motherhood, reinvention and the extraordinary places a willingness to leap before looking can take you.
You Must Have Been So Beautiful is not a conventional model memoir. Bell writes candidly about the glamour and absurdity of fashion, but also about homesickness, hunger, uncertainty, love and the determination required to make a life on her own terms.
Vivid, funny and unsentimental, it is the story of a woman who kept moving - from Johannesburg to Vancouver, Paris, Milan and New York - and, most of the time, landed on her feet.
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