Gorge Guide

AUTHOR READING: BIBI GASTON, "LOVELIEST WOMAN IN AMERICA"

Tuesday, June 30, 2009
7:00 p.m.
Hood River County Library Meeting Room
502 State Street, Hood River, OR 97031

Overview
Waucoma Bookstore and the Hood River County Library are hosting Gorge author Bibi Gaston for a book reading and slideshow at the Hood River County Library Meeting Room on Tuesday, June 30th at 7:00pm. Gaston will be reading from her book “The Loveliest Woman in America”. The book is about Gaston's grandmother Rosamund Pinchot, an acclaimed actress, socialite, and sportswoman who was named “The Loveliest Woman in America” in 1927 at the age of twenty-three.

About the Book
In 1927, at the age of twenty-three, Rosamond Pinchot was hailed as "The Loveliest Woman in America." At thirty-three, in a sudden, shocking, and highly public act, Rosamond took her own life, setting in motion generations of confusion in the family she left behind. Nearly seventy years after her demise, her granddaughter Bibi received a box of more than 1,500 pages of Rosamond's diaries and embarked on a seven-year journey to make sense of the silence that surrounded Rosamond's death and to discover the grandmother she never knew.

An acclaimed beauty, actress, socialite, and outdoors woman, Rosamond became the key to Bibi's understanding of her enigmatic and adventurous father, her glamorous but painfully divided family, and herself. Through the silent labyrinth of a brilliant but troubled family, Bibi pieced together Rosamond's life story—her magical embrace of nature, her love for two compelling but difficult men, and her circle of "on tops," intimates, and mentors, including Elizabeth Arden, Eleanor Roosevelt, George Cukor, and David O. Selznick.

Bibi also discovered the tragic legacy of the women in her family, including Rosamond's cousin Edie Sedgwick and her half sister, Mary Pinchot Meyer, whose murder in 1964 has never been solved. As if looking in a mirror, Bibi found parts of herself in the complex, tragic, yet beautiful story of the high-spirited Rosamond Pinchot and designed a mission at midlife: to outlive the often difficult, but exuberant and passionate, lives of her ancestors.

About the Author
Bibi Gaston has been a practicing landscape architect for twenty years. She divides her times between New York City and the Columbia River Gorge, where, like her grandmother, she is learning to fish and tie her own flies. She has kept a diary since the age of eight.

Resources
Featured interview and photos from the New York Social Diary http://www.newyorksocialdiary.com/node/136306

Bibi's Interview with The Dalles Chronicle http://www.thedalleschronicle.com/news/2008/12/news12-14-08-01.shtml