The Bridesmaid's Daughter: From Grace Kelly's Wedding to a Women's Shelter - Searching for the Truth About My Mother

About this book

A daughters moving search to understand her mother Carolyn Scottonce a bridesmaid to Princess Grace and one of the first Ford modelswho later in life spent years living in a homeless shelter. 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 familys private ordeal made so publicthe woman mentioned on that cover Carolyn Scott Reybold was her mother. Nynas childhood had been spent in doctors offices. Too ill she was told to go to school like other children she spent nearly every waking moment at her mothers side at their isolated Long Island estate or on trips into the city to see the ballet. The doctors couldnt tell her what was wrong but as Nyna grew up her mother whod 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 shed met the young Grace Kelly and that the two had become fast friends. Nyna had seen the photos of Carolyn at Graces 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 upthe mother who was now living in a shelter? In this powerful memoir of friendship and motherhood Nyna Giles uncovers her mothers past to answer the questions she never knew to ask.