Nowhere Girl

Starred review from July 5, 2021
Former model Diamond (Naked Rome) offers a transfixing chronicle of her coming-of-age bouncing from city to city and country to country to outrun the authorities. Her family—a tight band of five comprising her parents, sister, and brother—lived a life straight out of a thriller that was marked by false identities, financial schemes, deep mistrust, and a desperation to avoid Interpol officers. “By the age of nine, I will have lived in more than a dozen countries, on five continents, under six assumed identities,” she writes. As her family flitted from India to South Africa to America—committing forgery and fraud along the way—she was taught how to survive through judo lessons and a detailed escape plan (which she was entrusted with at age 13) to use “if everything goes to hell”—but she never learned her parents’ real names to protect them and herself. In a propulsive, at times harrowing, narrative, Diamond recounts the tutelage of her psychologically abusive father, how she went from being homeless to a successful fashion model in New York City, and a debilitating illness that devastated her mind and body in her early 20s. Eloquent and bracing, Diamond’s story will haunt readers long after the last page.

June 1, 2021

Diamond (Model: A Memoir) describes the incredible story of her childhood spent on the run. Born in New Zealand, to parents and siblings who were already living under assumed identities, Diamond (using a fake birth certificate) travels with her family from India to Australia to South Africa to Canada to Germany. Her parents' source of income is nebulous, but somehow relates to the gold bullion market. Her father, who determines the family's trajectory, is alternately cryptic and grandiose, coldly critical and physically abusive. Diamond effectively conveys an atmosphere of psychological suspense as she begins to unravel the events that led to her parents' fugitive status. Their lives crater in Virginia during Diamond's teenage years. There her brother Frank, who sexually abused her, inexplicably disappears, and her sister Chiara runs away and threatens to expose the family. Diamond escapes to New York to try modeling but cannot extricate herself from her parents. She sensitively traces her diagnosis of Crohn's disease and her life with chronic illness, along with her fraught decision to finally escape her family and claim a legal identity and citizenship. VERDICT Diamond's memoir is compulsively readable; for fans of suspense novels or memoirs like Tyler Wetherall's No Way Home.--Barrie Olmstead, Lewiston P.L., ID

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 1, 2021
Diamond has always been caught between the Con Man and the Cop. Hers was a life lived on the lam, either eluding the henchmen hired by her maternal grandfather to return her family to his iron-fisted control in Luxembourg, or evading Interpol officers out to arrest her father for myriad financial schemes. The family was always prepared for the middle-of-the-night knock on the door that would send them scrambling for their stash of fake passports, with their belongings either crammed into suitcases or stashed in storage lockers around the globe. As a result, Diamond learned how to spot a surveillance tail before she could recite her ABCs. Eventually, penniless and homeless, she parlayed her emaciated body and bruised beauty into a career as a teen model, only to have the accumulated stress of such an uncertain existence manifest in a life-threatening illness that would force her to reconcile with one of the two men responsible for her condition. The survivor of extreme psychological and physical abuse, Diamond recounts her lifelong struggle to discover her true self in a beyond-harrowing memoir. Within the autobiographical subset of children-overcoming-adversity that was defined by Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle (2005) and Tara Westover's Educated (2018), Diamond's tale might just be the most mind-blowing of them all.

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