Metropolis by elizabeth gaffney5/27/2023 ![]() ![]() Walls made her name exposing celebrity secrets. By the end of the book, her obesity has become a paradoxical testament to the depth of her humanity. Life as a fat person-which she describes in unflinchingly stark, yet sometimes lyrical and often funny ways-keeps her forever on the outside. Faced with abandonment, emotional isolation, random disdain and wanton cruelty, Moore comforts herself with food. Judith Moore ambushes you on the very first page of this memoir, and in short order has lifted you up and broken your heart with a portrait of the artist as a young pariah. But she compensates with brawny, old-school storytelling, blending fact with fiction to produce a novel as strong and heady as the brew her rakes and roustabouts swill by the pint. Forget the overreaching jacket copy: Gaffney doesn't have Dickens's touch with character or his gift for comedy. In this debut novel, Paris Review editor Gaffney lovingly resurrects Gilded Age New York, following a luckless German immigrant and his gangster-moll girlfriend from the depths of its sewer system to the heights of the Brooklyn Bridges still-unfinished towers. ![]()
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