"A beautiful book. Martin Moran is a graceful, witty, perceptive writer, remarkably brave, free of self-pity - his spirit, manifest on every page, is discerning and generous to the point of radiance. He's a scrupulous and precise rememberer and explorer, and because he refuses simplification for the sake of judgment and yet insists on the necessity of rendering judgment, The Tricky Part is fully human, unsettling and wise."

"A tender, searingly honest, and heartbreaking account of the legacy of sexual violation. Moran bravely unveils the tricky part: the paradoxical worlds of longing and shame, the erotic and the reviled, the profane and the sacred all living in one act, one man, one life. Gorgeously written, the book is a divine literary and spiritual exorcism."

"Martin Moran has written a story about difficult, painful and deeply personal events in his life with uncommon generosity and decency. The story is shocking, even brutal, but I felt cleansed at its end. He has found compassion where I would have thought there was none. When art does that, it enriches us, and his book is art."

"Martin Moran has written an account of a childhood at once conventional and nearly unfathomable. A deep, tempered spirit shines through every page, by turns understated and dazzling, wildly comic and gut wrenching."

"Martin Moran not only writes unflinchingly about the sexual abuse of a child, he expands it into a meditation on suffering, despair, forgiveness, redemption, and the mysterious workings of grace. He elevates the confessional to the level of art."

"The Tricky Part is a story of sexual abuse and its seemingly endless half life-remarkable, then, that this isn't a book about blame, but forgiveness."

"Those of us, and we are legion, whose innocence has not been lost so much as taken, have a choice. We can remain children and insist on a black and white vision of perpetrators and victims, or, like Martin Moran, we can grow up. We can arrive at the understanding that love is only as pure, or as whole, or as beautiful, as the always imperfect beings who offer and demand it."

"The Tricky Part is that rare, triumphant thing-a book so bravely remembered and so fully imagined as to be capable of rendering a life in all of its moral complexity."

"In an age where reality television exploits intimacy, and tell-all autobiographies have become endemic, Martin Moran's book restores faith in the literary memoir. In documenting his troubling childhood relationship with a much older man, he eschews ready sensationalism and-instead-bravely articulates the complexities that color even the most taboo relationships. And he accomplishes it all with a prose style that is rich, immediate and constantly surprising. His is a book both haunting and profound."