You can almost hear the pitch for Fisher's screenplay, currently in production and now fleshed out in his memoir: Dickens in Cleveland! The Color Purple, but true and male and set in the 1960s! The facts of his life have a movie-of-the-week ring: relentlessly abusive foster care; redemption through military service; and irrepressible intellect. But detailed accounting distinguishes the tale, and Fisher's searing, luminous portrait of his childhood transcends the familiar, as does his retroactive (and likely hard-won) tenderness toward the boy no one else loved.
--By Lise Funderburg
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