Race

Race plays a major role in The Dragons, The Giant, The Women, despite the fact that it does not come into play until Moore recalls moving to America with her family. Race becomes a central element to Moore’s sense of self at that point, replacing her nationality, ethnicity, and faith as key signifiers of identity and similarly becoming the way in which most people around her form judgements about her. Moore’s writing on the topic of race is thus highly ambivalent as she finds it both a nuisance to be judged on this basis but also a central element to her lived experience and sense of self.

For example, Moore writes about the friendships she formed at her first school in Texas and says that skin color played a huge role in those friendships. Though the black girls she and her sister spent time with were...