Dead Glamorous is glamour's autobiography, a true fiction for all boys and girls who ever saw their own faces in Clark Gable's cheekbones or Grace Kelly's eyes, a Panavision paradise for all those dying for a glimpse at the incestuous love affair between movies and real life. There is a movie for each moment, and so Carole Morin wittily, movingly, glamorously recounts her life, frame by frame. Flying is dead glamorous. God is dead glamorous. And New York City - the cinematic city - is dead glamorous.

Her mother, very cinematically, inherits millions, and thus begins their life in hot pursuit of Kelly bags, jet-set vacations, and everything ultra-glamorous. Carole has an early-period Liz Taylor voice. She has Kim Novak's gray suit from Vertigo. She has a brother who makes her heart race - he's a dead ringer for Montgomery Cliff.

Then he chooses a stylish demise - "Suicide's dead glamorous." As Carole watches her life's movie in her head, brother dead, mother impulsively gone, O'Keeffe-like, to New Mexico to live, boyfriend Dangerous Donald trying to stay in the picture, what emerges is a thrilling memoir of seduction, self-destruction and salvation - and every frame of it dead glamorous.