Episode #3: SKINLESS: Inside the Story: Spotlight: Meet Charmay
Character Spotlight: Meet Charmay: Self Described "Orphan Misfit Survivor;" Themes & Chapter Excerpts (non-spoiler)
Skinless: The Story of a Female Survivor is dark, literary crime novel about a singer who blurs into a glittering alter ego to survive addiction, crime, and class‑power, under the lingering haunt of trauma in the shadows of 1999 New York City.
For readers of Milkman, Cherry, In the Cut, The Basketball Diaries, Harley Rosee’s Twinsgate, Lucy Treloar’s Days of Innocence and Wonder, and dark, character‑driven literary noir.
Editor’s Note (January 2025):
BookLife’s review of SKINLESS focuses on Cindy’s “splintered sense of self” and the way the book’s structure reinforces her psychological fracturing “at every turn.” They note the unflinching imagery—“violent red from silver bucket. Fetus size a quarter, turned out.”—and the refusal of “editorial distance or cushioning metaphor.” For those who want the outside lens on this story, the full review + SKINLESS are here:
http://booklife.com/project/skinless-the-story-of-a-female-survivor-103872
Meet Charmay
CHARMAY is an “Orphan Misfit Survivor,” raised in a dysfunctional family and sexually abused by her stepfather. After a youth spent unhoused and hitchhiking across America, she lands on the Lower East Side, where drinking numbs and singing soothes the raw vulnerability she calls “skinless.”
To survive, she creates CINDY—a smooth, high‑earning persona who dances in upscale gentlemen’s clubs, working the desire, money, and power of Manhattan’s wealthy men. Charmay’s life is split between:
• Sam Black, her lover: a Cuban‑American weed kingpin and aspiring filmmaker whose business funds his cinematic dreams and their volatile love;
• Rex Revan, a rich, aging Wall Street patron obsessed with Cindy, blind to the woman beneath;
• A music producer who hears something real in her voice and pushes her to bring Charmay, not Cindy, to the mic.
As she navigates this triangle, the lines between survival and self‑betrayal blur. New York’s underground becomes a stage of hustles and danger: drugs, jealousy, and violence tighten around her. Past and present collide as Charmay’s childhood trauma resurfaces, crashing into the brutal economics of sex, addiction, and fame.
When a gun, a deal gone wrong, and a desperate choice force her to pick between performance and truth, Charmay must decide whether to stay fragmented—or risk becoming whole in a world that rewards masks.
Lurking beneath it all, the story traces the way trauma lives in the body: the tightening in her chest, the way the room warps, the flash of memory she shuts down before it fully forms. Caught between the urge to finally tell the truth about her childhood, and the terror of collapsing under it, Charmay hovers at the edge of the words at every turn. Skinless told through Charmay’s eyes shows how survival can sometimes mean silence—and how, for her, healing might begin with a single, dangerous name.
More character study than conventional thriller, SKINLESS uses lyrical, street‑poetic prose, interior monologue, and shifting time to explore trauma, dissociation, and identity. The second edition deepens these psychological layers while tightening structure and pace, laying the groundwork for an expanding series.
Kindle is just $3.99 today
A review from Author Stacey Donovan:
“Skinless is a revelation. Meet Charmay.
A wind tapped lightly at heavily drawn aluminum shades, wishing to breathe newness amidst the howling chaos. Me and Sam had one thing to cling to on this banal rock, and that was each other. Well, each other and whatever else we could get our hands on. Bare springs, mattress. Me. Cool air, tawny skin. Long dancer’s limbs, lanky legs. Naked on my back. Gold chestnut waves; my hollow eyes blindly, wide open staring into hue, blue.
Skinless is also a revolution—of survival.
People like me, with the trauma stuff from kidhood, don’t know how to stay in our own bodies. They call it ‘disassociate.’ We rather be in someone else’s body and feel their stuff, cause it’s less traumatic than our own. If you’d told me that back then I would have laughed at you and called you a freakin doctor softee who thinks it makes it better by knowing the reason why. I would have been half right––Knowing why you do what you do doesn’t make it go away or make it feel better. But it does help you start to love and understand yourself better, so at least you have some chance at healing the part of you that wants to kill yourself, and start loving yourself and maybe start wanting to live and feel and grow and find your dreams in the lightness of day. I don’t have all the answers. But I can say, I’m not dead yet, and I know that.
And from Moor, so much more. Quirky, singular, yet strangely familiar characters. A structure that features “past, present, future, all happening at once, inside us.” Language so original it vanishes words as we know them, the use of slang and vulgarity perfected with words and phrasing such as Fuck-o sap suck it, mankym, evening-wheres, or jamorous.
In a word, Skinless is a stunner. “
Stacey Donovan, and author of Dive
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/skinless-maggie-moor/1138664480
Charmay’s Story
Charmay, a young, beautiful singer‑songwriter haunted by childhood PTSD, returns to New York City in 1999 after teenage homelessness to build her career. In her back pocket is Cindy—a magnetic, seductive body‑double; armor that helps her not just pay the bills, but breathe—and powerful enough to take Charmay over.
Star‑crossed lovers collide in Times Square when she meets Sam, a young Cuban‑American running from his criminal past. Fueled by love and determined to bring their dreams to light, Charmay navigates a gritty triangle of sex, drugs, and manipulation, all while relentlessly writing lyrics in rock‑bottom moments and learning to turn her wounds into power through song.
Here I offer you brief non- spoiler Chapter excerpts to bring you into the written word of Skinless: The Story of a Female Survivor told through Charmay’s eyes.
The Charmay narrative below offers a glimpse into Charmay’s inner voice as she navigates early days in New York, caught between survival mode and fragile hope.” Outlines PTSD; trauma’s aftershocks; alcoholism.
Chapter Excerpt: Chapter 1: “Good Morning”
Outside, I felt safest in the strip bar. A little spot in the world where I could make my own choices, my own money, decide who could and could not touch me, and enjoy the primitive sexuality I felt transported me out.
Apparently, that’s all trauma victim shit too. Not making excuses—don’t have to excuse anything in my life. Just brass tack real: need to feel safe, control over my body, who touches.
I learned at a young age, my sex: powerful. Make a grown man weak and kill me if the wrong person fell victim to their desire for me. So, I learned that the real world was not a place to express attraction, but the strip bar was. And I always walked with cash—so I’d never be homeless again. More later—
The Charmay narrative below offers an introduction to Charmay slipping into the deepening relationship to her alter ego ‘Cindy.” As the novel progresses, Rex Revan’s obsession with Cindy, and the power games that shape their arrangement, fuel Charmay’s further desire to let Cindy take over her life; or in other words, fuels Charmay’s “self-diminishment.”
Chapter excerpt: “Rex”
So, back in the Lower East Side studio dive, see, when I was sitting on the floor, sundown glancing, listening to Sam spout Jess business, my root beer gazers (that’s my word for my shade of brown eyes) rested on the sea of Crayola Sam-love; gifts of drooping blooms, half-written poem scrawled cards glittered vases; bling jewelry boxes, wallet mirrors. My thermionic current began to percolate boiling, an old familiar howling. This internal struggle that I had had since I began dancing at Gentleman’s Clubs when I was 19 years old, just off the road from hitching homeless.
Below I offer a passage that reveals Charmay’s coping mechanisms, fractured humor, and the people orbiting her nightlife world.
Chapter Excerpt: “Daffy”
Setting: Charmay wakes from a rough night. (non-spoiler)
People who don’t get trauma might say, just change your perspective, but when you’re getting hit by memories, resentments, suspicion, distrust, and anxiety from every curve, you do your best to survive it. If you’re drinking to soothe, it’s impossible to get off the hamster wheel, until you truly sober up. Start to feel it all. Feelings do transform over time, when you don’t push them away. Only way out is through. You gotta die to awaken, warrior.
People ask—is forgiveness ever totally possible when you’ve been sexually abused. Most people say you have to forgive to heal. It’s different for everyone. Worst is when people think they got all the answers for you. I can just share my own experience.
Me, I still get pulled undertow; black hole, sucking air, disoriented. I am more aware now of the feelings—what they are signifying and what triggers them. This helps me from reacting, and gives me the opportunity to choose my response; choose the circumstances I put myself in. I try to have compassion for myself. For me, I know the guy who did it was an alcoholic, the others guys who did stuff were messed up too—but it doesn’t make me forgive. I just try to learn and identify in myself the parts that need healing.
Really, I try mostly to trust God—the Universe. I don’t know why these things happened to me in my life. My Mom would say it was because I was drinking, or acting too flirty, which basically means I deserved it. I don’t think so. I do think that, and maybe this is crazy talk but it helps me, I think that the Universe has a plan, and for some reason, I have to go through what I go through in life to become the best version of me possible; whatever I set my mind to. Be of service to the Universal Life Force—to others, to you, to me. I don’t know what or how I learned from all this. So much we don’t know about our own selves. I try to trust, heal.
The non-spoiler excerpt below is the exact moment Charmay circles the name of the man who abused her—but cannot yet say it out loud. On the surface, she’s just telling a story, but underneath she’s fighting a war with language itself. Every time she comes close to naming him, her mind skids sideways into nicknames, jokes, and half‑phrases, as if the syllables themselves might burn her tongue. She understands, on some level, that saying his name would make his violence undeniable and real in a way she’s spent years outrunning. To speak it would mean admitting what happened—to herself, not just to the world.
CHAPTER EXCERPT: “JOHN WAYNE”
Setting: Charmay in a PTSD episode.
Charmay narrative:
I guess I’m getting more comfortable saying his name. He wanted to be John Wayne, he said. People say I’m supposed to talk about this. Say lots of us exerienced this kinda secret our whole life, good to talk it. Wish I could hear you talk too, right now. I mean, it’s no fun this kind of secret stuff. Telling people never made it better either.
That’s the money. Money made it better, felt numbing. Like in the bathroom stall at Hudson with old Rex; every time some guy slid his finger up my yank at some club; every time I felt I was going to get left stranded by Sam—the money. Made it better. Money meant, no matter who fucked with me: I knew I could survive.
“Macho,” Mom once jeered at me. “Walking like a man,” she heckled. “You look so stupid.”
I was fifteen. I’d accidentally swagger’d one Jersey day walking kitchen to the bedroom in the two-room ranch she got. Mom said she wanted a fresh start—to get away from him, not because of what he did to me. Mom never knew—or acted like she didn’t. She was looking for a new husband and kid. New York City—
I didn’t answer.
Mom was asking if I was gay. Drew was locked up then—his friends, guys in their twenties were watching me most. Taking me out like a little sister, like the Natalie Portman in The Professional. I was straight, to my own detriment probably, but—putting guy-like tough airs, making men my role models, made the world seem safer.
If I’m losing you on this, I hear you. I was lost myself. Here, I’m telling you something I probably shouldn’t even tell anyone at all, ever.
Sometimes a drunk blacks out. Sometimes a drunk recalls every single detail, like a detective’s mind. Every little glint light hits the wall as you move; every subtle nuance a word spoken. I remember clear as day that night with Sam.
In Closing
This glimpse into Charmay’s fear of speaking his name is just one facet of how trauma has silenced her. Where language fails, music steps in.
When she can’t push the word past her throat, she sings around it—bending melody, hiding truth in lyrics, turning pain into sound. The mic becomes a place where she can shake, crack, and still keep going. Each song lets her release what she can’t yet say straight, until slowly, line by line, her voice stops belonging to the man who hurt her and starts belonging back to her. Through music, Charmay begins not just to survive her story, but to rewrite it.
…A piece of the music that helps her carry what she can’t say yet. (non-spoiler)
Charmay's Song “Little Girl’s Eyes”
Skinless: The Story of a Female Survivor (Book 1: Charmay: New York Noir)
SKINLESS is not just entertainment; it’s about awareness—
of trauma, survival, and the quiet, complicated ways people carry what’s been done to them. My hope is that Charmay’s story doesn’t just keep you turning pages, but also helps illuminate realities we’re often taught to hide or minimize.
Thank you for joining me.
Read Skinless
SKINLESS is a fast‑paced psychological suspense and a portrait of a young female artist fighting to heal.
Substack “Inside the Story” is a space to explore the world of SKINLESS, second edition revised & expanded, 2025. Welcome…
If any of this speaks to you, I’d love you to step into Charmay’s world.
• Title: Skinless (Book 1 of Charmay: New York Noir)
• Themes: race, class, family abandonment, trauma, sexuality, spiritual growth
Explore the Official Website: hear music, learn more about Maggie Moor
Follow Socials @maggiemoor @SkinlesstheBook @CharmayMusic
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Goodreads Reviews | Share your review
Recent Words from Others:
“This is different and that is good. It tells a story which is worth the hearing but it also offers some amazing characters and a writing style which is somehow modern and vintage at the same time. The style takes you into the mind of the protagonist in a way which conventional, descriptive prose may not. I really liked it.”— Louise, NetGalley reviewer, 4 stars
“Interesting read, my first book from this author. This story flips between past and present tense. A woman fighting her traumatic past. Fast paced page turner. Did not disappoint”— Jemma, NetGalley reviewer, 4 stars
“Skinless is intense, emotional, and beautifully written. The story dives deep into identity, survival, and self-discovery with honesty and grit. Every scene feels alive, and Char may’s journey stays with you long after you finish reading. A powerful, unforgettable read.”— Annie, Goodreads reviewer, 5 stars
• You can find Skinless at Barnes & Noble / The Strand / Everywhere Books are Sold
And if you read it, I’d truly love to hear what resonates—whether it’s a line about race, a scene about class, a moment of abandonment that feels too familiar, or the small sparks of hope that show up in the strangest places.
You can reply to this post or email me with your thoughts. I’m listening.
Episode #4 next week: Skinless: Inside the Story : Charmay & Cindy: Double life. Alter-ego. Survival.
Maggie Moor offers only Free content. New SKINLESS: Inside the Story every Tuesday.