“PostMortem is as unflinching an act of courage as you’re likely to find in everyday life, a journey through soul-rotting self-destruction and its bitter zone of pain toward grace and forgiveness and the ultimate necessity of love…
Laurel Saville is capable of steady lucid prose that continually ascends to eloquence, wisdom, and, at the end of it all, compassion.”

–Bob Shacochis, National Book Award-winning Author of Easy in the Islands and The Immaculate Invasion

Sadly, some lives cannot be understood until after death. So it was with Anne Ford. A charming beauty queen, model, and fashion designer during the 1950s, this glamour girl was poisoned by internal demons and the permissive Southern California culture of the 1960s and 70s. She ended her life as an alcoholic street person, stabbed and strangled in a burned-out building in West Hollywood. Years later, her daughter, the writer Laurel Saville, began the long process of unraveling the twin trajectories of this unusual life.

Postmortem takes the reader on an emotionally charged journey that ranges from her eccentric West Hollywood childhood to a top-secret, Depression-era airplane design. Whether describing the artists of the seminal Sunset Strip gallery where Andy Warhol got his start or the hippie parties at Barney’s Beanery, Saville’s distinctive prose lends insight into events and emotions. This candid exploration of one woman’s life and death ends up exposing unexpected and highly-charged truths about both mother and daughter.

In the photo in the case book, my mother’s face was scrubbed clean. Her eyebrows were plucked and her smooth black hair was marked only by scattered ghostly strands of gray. She was staring straight into the camera, her blue eyes faded, but her expression proud, challenging, defiant really. I looked into her face and started adding things up: at the time the picture was taken, my mother had been living for about six years on and off the streets, in her damaged house, or her car. She had been drinking large quantities of cheap red wine and smoking a pack of unfiltered cigarettes every day – or as often as she could get her hands on the stuff – for more than twenty years. She had not had regular meals or health care or showers or other basic niceties for more than five years. Her mind was deeply deteriorated from all the ways that her life had exacerbated its inherent flaws. But before all this, my mother was Miss Redondo Beach, Miss Legs, a model, a fashion designer, a glamorous girl-about-town. She knew how to take a good picture. And in this picture, she’s posing. In this picture, the purples, blacks, blues, and reds that in another part of her life might have been makeup came instead from a huge bruise that spilled over her right eye and cheek. In spite of everything, the photo shows a handsome, some would say beautiful woman who looked as much as a decade younger than her 53 years. I thought: the most striking thing about my mother is not that she was murdered, but that she survived for as long as she did.

Laurel Saville’s fiction, essays, and articles have appeared in The Bennington Review, House Beautiful, Room, and many other publications. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She lives and writes in the Mohawk River valley of upstate New York. www.laurelsaville.com