Postmortem by Laurel Saville

Postmortem (iUniverse,196p,1440161070)  is a harrowing story about Anne Ford, a charming beauty queen, model and fashion designer in Southern California during the 1950s who wound up a penniless drunk found stabbed and strangled in a burned-out building in West Hollywood. Anne Ford was also the mother of Laurel Saville, author of Postmortem.

"My mother was murdered.

No matter how many times I say this, no matter how many people I tell, the strangeness of this sentence never changes. My tongue feels thick around the words, even though, after years of practice, they come out smoothly. I try not to watch the person who hears this piece of unexpected bad news. But I do. I look for the freshness of their surprise, for the way their eyes flicker, their mouth tightens. I watch and wonder what they're thinking of me and of who my mother was or might have been."

You may be thinking this is a murder mystery, but it's not. It's a portrait of Laurel as a child attempting to process and untangle herself from the deep shadow of her larger than life, stunningly beautiful mother fully ingrained in Southern California's permissive 60s and 70s culture. In this memoir, Laurel gives voice to her eccentric West Hollywood childhood, where she was raised within a community of hippies, musicians and artists who orbited her charismatic mother. While these artists were merely "just people who hung out in paint-spattered pants to Laurel, her mother was surrounded by the "Ferus group" from the seminal Sunset Strip gallery where Andy Warhol got his start, which included artists suca as John Altoon, Craig Kauffman, Billy Al Bengston, Ed Ruscha, and Ed Kienholz. This former Miss Redondo Beach and Chouinard Art Institute graduate seemed to lead a charmed life, dating Marlon Brando, designing a fashion line and partying with hippies at the legendary Barney's Beanery. Postmortem reads as much as a fascinating social history as a portrait of a family.

However, Laurel doesn't let these intriguing, colorful details blunt her memories of her often disturbing childhood. She reveals with brutal honesty an increasingly absent father and a narcissistic mother who experiences a torturous decline into alcoholism, mental illness, homelessness and ultimately, a violent, tragic death.

Postmortem takes the reader on an emotionally charged journey that ranges from Saville's eccentric West Hollywood childhood, to a top-secret, Depression-era airplane design. Whether describing the artists of the seminal Sunset Strip gallery where Andy Warhol got his start or the hippie parties at the legendary Barney's Beanery, Saville's distinctive prose lends insight into the events and emotions that surrounded the life and death of stunning Anne Ford. This candid exploration of one woman's life and death ends up exposing unexpected truths about both mother and daughter and unscrambling the many webs that entangled Ford's exceptional life.

Disclosure - This product was received for review/feature consideration. The synopsis/description was taken from Amazon or the back of the book.
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