GLEAH POWERS

Million Dollar Red: A Memoir

“A compelling, fascinating memoir of a woman, who, like her mother before her, tries to find herself through the eyes of men, but who, unlike her mother, is able to step into her own vision and voice. Gleah Powers captures her life with great verve and wit—Million Dollar Red is a gem.”Gayle Brandeis, author of The Art of Misdiagnosis: Surviving My Mother's Suicide

 

“Divorcees, gamblers, celebrities, cultists? We now live in the culture that Gleah Powers so prophetically explored as a young woman in the 1960s, 70s and 80s ...”F.X. Feeney, critic LA Review of Books, author Orson Welles: Power, Heart & Soul


“Gleah Powers scales the fortress, braves the unknown, and shares the adventure. She sets a heroic example of how to save your own life, one story at a time.” —Jillian Lauren, New York Times bestselling author of Some Girls: My Life in a Harem

An amazing memoir which recounts, in flinty, lucid, riveting prose, the story of an American girl and American history—from desert and mountain country to Manhattan, from bare-bones poverty to flourishing old money wealth, from life-broken failures to international celebrities. Gleah Powers’ story is moving, but never sentimental, absolutely and fearlessly candid, stocked with surprises and some real shocks. Abused, used for her looks, her I-narrator never stops to feel self-pity, never stops her search for something deeper, higher, transcendent. Recommended! —James Robison, Whiting Grant winning author of novels and short stories

Million Dollar Red takes us on a glorious, whirlwind tour of the author’s wild life and dazzling mind. We follow her all over the country, from Arizona to Florida, from California to New York. We see her on her picaresque adventures, hanging out with Antonioni in Death Valley, and being ineluctably drawn to the seductive allure of cults. More importantly, we see the narrator figuring out how to be alive. The precision of language and of memory will make you weep, and Powers’ dry wit cuts through any risk of sentimentality. This book is an indelible portrait of the US in the 60's and 70's in all its gorgeous, shadowy excess, and a testament to the heart-rending talent of Gleah Powers who offers a window in what it is to be a young woman then and now. —Alistair McCartney, author of The Disintegrations

Gleah Powers began her adult life at age 14, not as a runaway, but as a "send away" in 1962.

Known as Linda in those days, her strong-willed grandmother put her on a greyhound bus to travel alone, cross-country, with no firm plans for a return. It was understood between them that Linda, a young artist, was strong enough. By her early teens she was already the jaded veteran of her mother's first three divorces. She felt ready for the world, all set to navigate men, sex, and love.

As the 1970s begin, Linda moves to Los Angeles in the shadow of the Manson Murders. She then bolts to New York, and falls in love: first, with a gay friend, next, with a famous art-collecting movie mogul, third, with a wealthy philanthropist descended from the Vanderbilt fortune. In a grand effort to put all these false father figures behind her, she takes up with the leader of a powerful upscale cult who holds a number of otherwise intelligent urban professionals under his great spell.

This dark, blazingly honest, and often jubilant and deeply funny memoir, climaxes with Linda's attempts to break through as an artist, be it as a painter or performer. She connects herself with the world … but it is a marriage and divorce, served bittersweet, a deathbed visit with her father and an icy refuge in Montana that plunge her into her authentic life.

Million Dollar Red: A Memoir is a Vine Leaves Press publication

 

Publication date: December 2, 2019

Genre: Personal Memoir

Paperback: ISBN-13: 978-1-925965-20-9

ePub: ISBN-13: 978-1-925965-21-6

Kindle ASIN: to come

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