All My Knotted-Up Life: A Memoir

When Moore was fifteen, her father was promoted to a position overseeing all the AMC multiscreen theaters in Houston, and the family moved to Texas despite their deep ties to Arkansas. Gay was a freshman in college, Moore was entering her sophomore year in high school, and Tony was starting eighth grade.

Moore’s new high school had 4,700 students, only a handful of them Black. Both she and Tony disliked their new schools. When the family returned to Arkadelphia to finish packing, Moore was denied the chance to go out with old friends who subsequently died in a fatal car accident.

The parents were still at “excruciating” odds, but Mom was in a better state of mind because, shortly before the move, Gay found a letter from her father’s mistress that proved his infidelity. Gay insisted on calling the mistress, who lived in Tennessee, and warned her to stop seeing their father. When the woman protested that she was going to marry their father, Gay told her mother about the affair. Vindicated, Mom stayed with Dad but punished him by refusing to speak to him for long periods at a time. She never left him.