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'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'm trying to make sure that there's comedy as well as sadness. It makes the sadness more memorable.
I'm trying to read more dead people because I keep having to read stuff for juries and so forth.
I am in Boston right now, in fact, to do work at the New England Historical Genealogical Library, where I'm trying to finish up tracing my lineage back to the seventeenth century.
I made this list of stuff that it's time for me to try to do.
The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is hardwired into my personality.
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.
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.
When prose gets too stylized and out of control - and Stein is sometimes a good example - when you don't know what the hell is going on, then it's kind of boring.
It made it more personal and easier to talk.
We ran hard and had a few injuries. We just didn't have anything go well this week.