Judith Moore, 66; Longtime Editor, Essayist Wrote ‘Fat Girl’

Judith Moore was fat. She wanted you to know that.

Near the beginning of her searingly honest 2005 memoir, “Fat Girl: A True Story,” she wrote: “This is a story about an unhappy fat girl who became a fat woman who was happy and unhappy.”

She hoped that her confessional tale would sound spoken rather than written, as if her painful truths of growing up overweight and unloved by her parents were “whispered into an ear.” Critics praised her candor and the sensual way she wrote about the food that became her haven.

Moore, who was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2003, died May 15 at Alta Bates Medical Center in Berkeley, said her daughter, Rebecca Moore. She was 66.

She told only her family about her illness because others tend to look differently at people who have cancer, she told her daughter.

An award-winning writer and author, Moore was also a longtime editor at the San Diego Reader, a weekly newspaper. She wanted people to focus on the message in “Fat Girl,” the latest of her three books, which she described as an “in-your-face” tome. She purposely kept it short so it could be read during an afternoon.

Her first book, “The Left Coast of Paradise: California and the American Heart” (1987), was a collection of 25 newspaper essays that showed a keen appreciation of the absurd. It included pieces on a neurotic elephant, a philosophically minded pimp and three nuns who traveled with a circus.

“Moore is a superb stylist and a sharp but also sentimental observer of the eccentricities and frailties of humankind,” Jonathan Kirsch said in a 1987 review in The Times.

Her second book, “Never Eat Your Heart Out” (1997), elevated food metaphors to an “art form,” the Seattle Times said in its review of the culinary memoir filled with essays on unforgettable meals and bittersweet memories.

“When you cook, one of the glorious moments is to sit at the table and watch everyone eat it,” Moore told the online magazine Salon in 1997. “It’s like going out and seeing someone reading your story in the newspaper. It’s very thrilling.”

Nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, “Fat Girl” could be difficult to read and impossible to put down.

The only child in an unhappy Oklahoma family, Moore wrote that she grew up in the 1940s missing her absent father, a lawyer whom her mother tossed out of the house after he forced a servant at gunpoint to make a lemon meringue pie.

Her painfully thin mother never forgave Moore’s father for becoming fat -- he weighed as much as 300 pounds -- or her child, who weighed 120 pounds in second grade.

As an adult, Moore was sketchy about describing her actual size, her daughter said, but saw herself as heavy even when she wasn’t because that image had been ingrained in childhood.

Moore’s account of the usually unspoken physical problems that overweight people confront made some readers uncomfortable, but there was poignancy amid the plain-spoken anger.

As a child, Moore dreamed that she could be small enough to be swept up on her father’s shoulders, but she also worried that firefighters wouldn’t be able to carry her from a burning building.

Her weight went up and down, as did her life.

Berated by her mother, Moore turned to food as a child to fill the hole inside her.

Moore’s account of the food at her grandmother’s Arkansas farmhouse, where her mother left her for several years, sounds almost joyous. “When I walk through the kitchen -- when I walk through the world -- my mouth is always on the prowl ... my mouth always wants something.”

Other passages brought different responses.

At her minister’s house, Moore broke into the pantry, made bologna sandwiches and toured the rooms, fantasizing that the family might adopt her. “That was one of the best sandwiches I ever ate -- the warm bread, the cold bologna, the sharp mustard,” Moore wrote.

A therapist friend told her he found the break-in passage “creepy,” which Moore said was her intent.

Born on Oct. 14, 1939, in Stillwater, Okla., Moore started grade school in New York City after her mother retrieved her from Arkansas. The family moved to Tallahassee, Fla., during her high school years.

Married and divorced twice, she graduated from Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., while raising two daughters.

Moore said she went out of her way to be the mother she never had. With her children, she gardened, cooked and canned, made dollhouses and raised generations of guinea pigs.

“My daughters’ childhoods are my happiest memories,” she once recalled.

Her elder daughter, Rebecca, said, “She really was a magical mother.”

In the 1980s, Moore moved to Berkeley and became a writer.

Essays she wrote for the weekly East Bay Express and the San Diego Reader led to a job at the Reader. As a senior editor and the paper’s book editor, Moore telecommuted from Berkeley for more than 20 years.

She received two National Endowment for the Arts awards and won a Guggenheim fellowship in 1999.

Once she became a professional writer in middle age, Moore was happy because “she got to use her mind. That was part of who she was,” her daughter said.

In addition to Rebecca, of Dunedin, Fla., Moore is survived by her other daughter, Sarah Sullivan, and a grandson of Tacoma, Wash.