Thursday Caitlin and I attended a Palm Beach Book Signing. The Bridesmaid's Daughter: From Grace Kelly's Wedding to a Women's Shelter - Searching for the Truth About My Mother
I had received a private invitation and the signing was held at a Worth Avenue boutique. It was sponsored by a local mental health organization and featured the new writer, Nyna Giles. During the course of the champagne reception, Nyna spoke and gave a very emotional description of her childhood. Here is how Amazon describes the book:
A daughter's moving search to understand her mother, Carolyn Scott - once a bridesmaid to Princess Grace and one of the first Ford models - who later in life spent years living in a homeless shelter.If you have been touched by mental illness growing up as Nyna had, I am sure the book will enlist deep emotions. An interesting subject matter that we all need to understand better in light of the most recent news.
Nyna Giles was picking up groceries at the supermarket one day when she looked down and saw the headline on the cover of a tabloid: "Former Bridesmaid of Princess Grace Lives in Homeless Shelter". Nyna was stunned, shocked to see her family's private ordeal made so public - the woman mentioned on that cover, Carolyn Scott Reybold, was her mother.
Nyna's childhood had been spent in doctor's offices. Too ill, she was told, to go to school like other children, she spent nearly every waking moment at her mother's side at their isolated Long Island estate or on trips into the city to see the ballet. The doctors couldn't tell her what was wrong, but as Nyna grew up, her mother, who'd always seemed fragile, became more and more distant. Now, Nyna was forced to confront an agonizing realization: She barely knew the woman on the magazine in front of her.
She knew that her mother had been a model after arriving in New York in 1947, living at the Barbizon Hotel, where she'd met the young Grace Kelly and that the two had become fast friends. Nyna had seen the photos of Carolyn at Grace's wedding, wearing the yellow 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 was now living in a shelter?
In this powerful memoir of friendship and motherhood, Nyna Giles uncovers her mother's past to answer the questions she never knew to ask.
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