The Artist's Statement: Illuminations on Skinless and beyond from Maggie Moor

Inspirations.

I wrote SKINLESS as an X-ray of the human urge to fill an inner void—and of the courage it takes to let go of false identities, quick fixes, and manipulative games to build a life grounded in the heart. In late-1990s New York City, Charmay, a young singer-songwriter haunted by trauma, hides behind a crafted persona to survive the visceral PTSD flashbacks she calls “Skinless,” while she struggles to reclaim the girl she lost.

With the intimacy of a confessional mic, Skinless invites you into Charmay’s real-time interior—an unfiltered first-person voice from within the silenced emotions that long to be heard. Woven through is the steadier voice of the now, as memories spill into Charmay’s present—blurred, fractured—coalescing as lyric fragments, hard‑boiled wit, jazz‑syncopated perceptions, and visceral bodily sensations.

It navigates moments where trauma meets longing, and shows how we find light at the darkest edges of our minds, the city streets, the touch of another—making song and words from our most honest places—amid race and class fault lines. This book is for anyone who searches for light, stays open to healing, and seeks the honest beauty within—and art only they can create.

Second Edition and Series.

Over 100 pages longer—not for word count, but to give space to voices and scenes once too exposed. Original: ~79,000 words, 235 pages (6×9). New: ~84,000 words, 374 pages (5.5×8.5). The new page count reflects added material and a smaller trim size.

Why a Second Edition? I reclaimed rights to Skinless (published 2021) in 2024 because I wanted more flexibility with creating the series: Charmay: New York Noir, and full access to rights for the TV and Film scripts.

For this second edition (2025) I added more songwriting, live-stage performance, and a new storyline with a legendary producer—a mercurial artist I secured permission to portray—and vocal coach, to deepen the arc into songwriting as a pathway for healing and integrating self through verbal expression of what lives deep in the cells.

Skinless the story sinks into hidden places and examines the humanity found there—sometimes only in a song no one else may ever even hear.

Skinless, life on the page: 

• Street poetry, nights by the East River, lyrics written in rock bottom moments, East Village haunts, after-hours dives, eclectic clubs, boutique hotel rooms, fine-dining rooms, and diner corners—a slice of NYC’s 1990s arts-underground history.

• Family, Race, and Class divide: Abandonment, addiction, the search for a father, the shelter of an alter ego—Cindy—built to navigate class and power, even as it distances the truest art; Capitalist society in a city that profits on performance, hides scars behind wealth and masks, while survival of the fittest is left up to grabs, regardless of wealth.

• Passion’s heat: Violence, drugs, loyalty and betrayal, love and weapons, conflated with the hunger for protection.

• Use of time: Past, present-story, and the reflective voice from “now,” through healthier survivor’s lens, exemplify the throughline philosophy Charmay states in the prologue: “Past, present and future are happening at once inside of us.”

• Race and class in a city that profits on performance and hides its scars behind wealth and masks.

Music in Skinless, and onward: 

• The songs written and performed by Charmay in Skinless come from scenes and lyrics from my stage life—the story behind the songs as I wrote my debut album, “Red Devil Trickery” (all later featured on my Greatest Hits EP)—album recordings featuring New York City jazz and blues legends. The companion album Skinless: Songs from the Book has songs previously released by me, and some songs I recorded during that time and never released, recorded by artist Charmay. 

• All books in the series Charmay: New York noir follow Charmay, singer-songwriter, and feature songs written by me, some already released, some new recordings written by Charmay in the books. 

• Themes of addiction, resilience, healing, and the blur between art, life, and brushes with death will remain as we follow Charmay through world travels, different identities, creating, performances, and the search to understand humanity and intimacy.

Closing.

Skinless isn’t a story polished for comfort; it’s an exploration of humanity’s most primitive and prismatic: masks, persona, truth—and the courage it takes to live from your heart. 

Skinless offers light—to keep expressing, to give language to the unsayable. It’s an expanded X‑ray of survival: an exploration in story and music from the inside, a crescendo out of silence, reaching out and to touch anyone still half‑hidden in their shell.

I’m not much for goodbyes—simply, now. Stay on the growing side of diminished. ~MM