The James Logan Courier

Judith Moore's breathtakingly frank memoir, Fat Girl, is not for the faint of heart. It packs more emotional punch in its slight 196 pages than any doorstopper confessional. But the author warns us in her introduction of what's to come, and she consistently delivers. "Narrators of first-person claptrap like this often greet the reader at the door with moist hugs and complaisant kisses," Moore advises us bluntly. "I won't. I will not endear myself. I won't put on airs. I am not that pleasant. The older I get the less pleasant I am. I mistrust real-life stories that conclude on a triumphant note.... This is a story about an unhappy fat girl who became a fat woman who was happy and unhappy." With that, Moore unflinchingly leads us backward into a heartbreaking childhood marked by obesity, parental abuse, sexual assault, and the expected schoolyard bullying. What makes Fat Girl especially harrowing, though, is Moore's obvious self-loathing and her eagerness to share it with us. "I have been taking a hard look at myself in the dressing room's three-way mirror. Who am I kidding? My curly hair forms a corona around my round scarlet face, from the chin of which fat has begun to droop. My swollen feet in their black Mary Janes show from beneath the bottom hem of the ridiculous swaying skirt. The dressing room smells of my beefy stench. I should cry but I don't. I am used to this. I am inured." Moore's audaciousness in describing her apparently awful self ensures that her reader is never hardened to the horrors of food obsession and obesity. And while it is at times excruciatingly difficult bearing witness to Moore's merciless self-portraits, the reader cannot help but be floored by her candor. With Fat Girl, Moore has raised the stakes for autobiography while reminding us that our often thoughtless appraisals of others based on appearances can inflict genuine harm. It's a painful lesson well worth remembering. --Kim Hughes

James was working as a tenor sax sideman with jazz legend Jimmy Scott when he penned this book, which was written in hotel rooms, vans, airports and on New York City buses. He had been a journalist for eight years when at age 30, he quit his job as a Washington Post feature writer and moved to New York to pursue music. He slept on mattresses, played in blues bands, taught ESL to Polish refugees, and played weddings on Long Island. While struggling through self-described "unsettled angst" he came to realize that the key to his search lay behind the story of the most interesting person he'd ever known in his life -- and the person he loved the most -- his own mother. He set about interviewing Ruth McBride Jordan and searching out her mysterious past, a process that took 14 years and resulted in a book that is regarded as a landmark work and an American classic. Says McBride of The Color of Water: "If I had known so many people were going to read that book, I would've written a better book."

“Packy was overflowing with love for his fellow man. He had been a guest of the United States Government for twelve years, four months, and two days. But because he had served over 85 percent of his sentence and been a model prisoner, the parole board had reluctantly granted Packy his freedom as of November 12, which was only two weeks away.”

“Rows of pews were filled with people who were waiting to be called before the Heavenly Council. People who had to answer for certain things they’d done-or not done-in life, before they received admission to heaven.”

The name "Sterling" is used 311 times in He Sees You When You're Sleeping

I'll so offend, to make offence a skill; Redeeming time when men think least I will
—Prince Harry, "King Henry IV, Part I"

“Oh! but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire, secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait, made his eyes red, his thin lips blue, and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice.”