Always Wear Joy: My Mother Bold and Beautiful

Growing up with a black, Auntie Mame — like mother who performed with the likes of Lena Horne and Alvin Ailey, and a WASP seafaring father, Susan Fales-Hill thought nothing of watching her mother, Josephine Premice, perform in an acclaimed Broadway musical one moment and fleeing to Faleton, her grandparents' summer estate, the next.

But it was from her mother — a woman who was dressed by Givenchy and sculpted by Alexander Calder, yet rejected by many a casting agent for her "dark," unc…