Paying tribute to Judith Moore

The SF Chronicle’s Edward Guthmann collects anecdotes and tributes about Bay-area writer Judith Moore (best known for the searing memoir FAT GIRL), who died last month of cancer at the age of 66. “She had a huge and broken heart,” said Anne Lamott, who visited Moore in the final few months of her life. “Tremendous amount of compassion for the underdog and the marginalized. Certainly a big champion for writers who weren’t getting the attention she thought they deserved.”

Moore also served as senior editor of the San Diego Reader for 20 years, editing stories by young writers, selecting poems, reviewing books and interviewing authors about their latest work. Her boss, publisher Jim Holman, didn’t mind that she worked from Berkeley and rarely visited San Diego; he felt that no one could do the For Moore, the editing gig at the Reader gave her the opportunity to discover and nurture — to pass on the qualities that her mother so assiduously denied her.

“I think all of her life in Berkeley was about coming to terms with her life and her past,” says Jerry Miller, a Seattle educator who lived with Moore and her second husband for five years. “She said a couple months ago that in her whole life she was never as happy as she was when she went to Berkeley and started writing.”

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