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Nyna Giles, twenty-nine, was in the queue at the supermarket when she looked down and saw the headline: ‘Former Bridesmaid of Princess Grace Lives in Homeless Shelter’. Nyna was stunned; her family’s private ordeal was front page news. The woman on that cover was her mother.
The truth was, she barely knew who her mother had been before marriage. She knew Carolyn had been a model – arriving in New York in 1947, where she’d met the young Grace Kelly, and that the two had become fast friends. Nyna had seen the photos of her mother at Grace’s wedding, wearing the bridesmaid gown that had hung in her closet for years. But how had the seemingly confident, glamorous woman in those pictures become the mother she knew growing up – the mother who told her she was too ill to go to school and kept her isolated at home?
In her journey to uncover her mother’s past Nyna relives a story as classic, familiar, dark and dangerous as any fairy tale.
‘One of the best personal accounts of the horror of mental illness unchecked since Susan Sheehan’s Is There No Place on Earth for Me.’ Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, author of Shrinks
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