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
What genre it falls under is only of interest later.
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.
Cool is spent. Cool is empty. Cool is ex post facto. When advertisers and pundits hoard a word, you know it's time to retire from it. To move on. I want to suggest, therefore, that we begin to avoid cool now. Cool is a trick to get you to buy garments made by sweatshop laborers in Third World countries. Cool is the Triumph of the Will. Cool enables you to step over bodies. Cool enables you to look the other way. Cool makes you functional, eager for routine distraction, passive, doped, stupid.
I think literature is best when it's voicing what we would prefer not to talk about.
I think first-person narrators should be complex, because otherwise the first-person is too shallow and predictable. I like a first-person narrator who can't totally be trusted.
Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem.
The Great Recession is not imaginary, and the effects loom large. There was an article in the NYT about the galloping death rate among white men in middle age. Higher than among any other demographic, etc. Mostly death by drugs, alcohol, or suicide. Many of them rural. My feeling is that it's many people who haven't been able to get back into the work force. Reg Morse is an example of the problem.
My contention is that that style is just as stylized as an ornate style.
I'm trying to make sure that there's comedy as well as sadness. It makes the sadness more memorable.
The Ice Storm, because of the movie, has had, or is to have, a vigorous life in other cultures.
Impotence, fetishism, bisexuality, and bondage are all facts of life, and our fiction should reflect that.
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.
It turns out that my memory is just not that great, so for specific scenes with people doing stuff, sometimes I'd have the details all wrong or I couldn't remember what happened exactly, so I just let that be.
I am a better writer for having fewer demons, and I am more curious about the world and the people in it. So those of you thinking you might need your demons in order to be creative: I beg to differ.