Rick Moody
Rick Moody
Hiram Frederick "Rick" Moody IIIis an American novelist and short story writer best known for the 1994 novel The Ice Storm, a chronicle of the dissolution of two suburban Connecticut families over Thanksgiving weekend in 1973, which brought him widespread acclaim, became a bestseller, and was made into a feature film of the same title. Many of his works have been praised by fellow writers and critics alike, and in 1999 The New Yorker chose him as one of America's...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth18 October 1961
CountryUnited States of America
I suppose that the sympathetic/unsympathetic debate about characters sometimes feels to me like a misstatement of purpose. I always think of truly complex characters are falling between the cracks in that debate.
Have I mentioned that I expect death around every turn, that every blue sky has a safe sailing out of it, that every bus runs me over, that every low, mean syllable uttered in my direction seems to intimate the violence of murder, that every family seems like an opportunity for ruin and every marriage a ceremony into which calamity will fall and hearts will be broken and lives destroyed and people branded by the mortifications of love?
I'm trying to stay close to language first and foremost and make sure that the paragraphs sing, that it sounds like music to me.
I judged about a zillion awards this year so I've been reading a lot of books that just came out.
What happened was that after I wrote The Ice Storm I had a period where I was blocked for a little bit, before I wrote Purple America.
What genre it falls under is only of interest later.
This is odd, but there are certain things that are really embarrassing to talk about - one is my job and the success that I've had in it, and the other is money.
My letters to Pat are apologies. I was the oldest. I should have been there for him.
Nonfiction that uses novelistic devices and strategies to shape the work. That's material that I really like.
My grandfather was a newspaper publisher and his paper had all the comics in NYC, so some of my earliest memories are of reading the family paper and heading straight for the comics insert.
Writing the book was itself a process of concealing and revealing.
It made it more personal and easier to talk.
They tell them to just keep walking north and don't look back. We've tried to apprehend some of these bandits.
The point is to balance on the edge between musicality and content.