Novelist Rick Moody

DATE May 9, 2002 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Rick Moody discusses his new book "The Black Veil: A
Memoir With Digressions"
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

My guest Rick Moody was described in a Washington Post book review as one of
the justly celebrated younger hopes of American fiction. The reviewer wrote,
`Moody's novels, "Purple America" and "The Ice Storm," which was adapted into
a film, capture an almost unnervingly perfect pitch, the jitteriness of a
suburbia deathly afraid of communicating its secret terror to itself and
perhaps more to the point to its children.'

Moody's new book, "The Black Veil," is subtitled: "A Memoir With
Digressions." He looks back on his life as a young man when he was taking
drugs, drinking too much and eventually was overcome by a depression that led
to a stay in a psychiatric hospital, but that's just one thread of the book.
Others have to do with a legend about one of his ancestors and a Nathaniel
Hawthorne short story set to be inspired by that ancestor.

Let's start with a short reading from Rick Moody's "The Black Veil."

Mr. RICK MOODY (Author): `Melancholy isn't about anything. Melancholy is a
style or manner but no subject. Melancholy is a way of thinking, a way of
thinking about thinking, and it needs to consume the sufferer and thus needs
layers and strata and veneers in perpetuity in which to cloak and conceal
itself. Melancholy attempts to avoid detection. Melancholy is not a
preoccupation with death nor a recoiling from shop interiors or human
fellowship, nor is it a lack of interest in things of the world, though these
may be characteristics of melancholy. It's more our particular complexion to
thinking, a tightening, a spiraling, a funneling, a drilling, an incising, a
helixing, the direction of this cogitation being always down and in as when an
oral surgeon begins screwing into your molar during root canal, a
preoccupation with death, a recoiling from society, an enedoyna(ph), an
obsession with conscience. These follow with melancholy and they may
advertise themselves fleetingly as its true subject, but any transient theme
will soon give way to something worse, something darker and meaner, something
less lucid because the goal of melancholy is its direction and force and
shape, continuity of the illness. Any meaning of melancholy is vehicular,
decorative, like a viney overgrowth on the gates of the crypt where the
sufferer is cast down for his or her imprisonment. "All the world is
melancholy," Burton(ph) says, "every member of it."'

GROSS: That's Rick Moody reading from his new memoir, "The Black Veil."

Why did you want to write a memoir, particularly one focusing on your own bout
of depression?

Mr. MOODY: Well, the truth is I began the book not as a memoir but rather an
investigation of this Hawthorne story, "The Minister's Black Veil," and the
fact that it's putatively based on an ancestor of mine or a guy who is at
least theoretically an ancestor of mine, Handkerchief Moody. And in
researching that and thinking about it over the years, I came to feel that my
own story was very similar to this story of Handkerchief Moody. Indeed, maybe
even similar to the Hawthorne story. And so it just became natural to include
my history in the book.

GROSS: Tell us about Handkerchief Moody, your ancestor.

Mr. MOODY: Well, when I first heard the story from my grandfather when I was
a kid, he said that there was this minister in Maine who had accidently shot
and killed a childhood friend, and then later in life, out of remorse, worn a
veil all the time wherever he was in the world, on the street, at dinner,
among friends and so forth. And my grandfather said this guy was our direct
relation.

GROSS: How do you know?

Mr. MOODY: Well, you don't know. And part of the story is that my
grandfather was one of these fabulous tale-tellers. You know, he was from
Maine. He was full of that kind of Down East Yankee tendency to embellish and
exaggerate a little bit and furthermore would claim we were related to just
about anybody; as long as they had Moody as their surname, they were in the
house as far as he is concerned.

So there was always doubt associated with this tale, but my conjecture would
be that direct lineage is unnecessary, that families really claim lineage.
They claim mythological relation, and that's how they constitute themselves.

GROSS: So this story of this person who you think is your ancestor is that he
covered his face with a veil out of remorse for a murder that he had
committed. How does that relate to the Nathaniel Hawthorne story, "The
Minister's Black Veil"?

Mr. MOODY: Well, as Hawthorne himself makes clear because there's actually a
footnote about Handkerchief Moody in the original Hawthorne edition of the
story in "Twice-Told Tales"--as he makes clear the symbol has a slightly
different meaning in his story which is to say it's never exactly certain why
the Reverend Hooper(ph), who's the main character of the story wears the veil.
On some occasions, he says he wears it out of remorse. On other occasions, he
says he wears it out of sin or dread, but he very tactfully avoids being open
about it. And so the symbol becomes sort of polymorphous. It's just part of
Puritan life in a way. I think Hawthorne's intent was to suggest all the
Puritans had this dimension of the unknown about their character, always there
was concealment and one's relation to God was always obscured from other
people. So it's a slightly different spin on the symbol. And yet I do feel
that Hooper and Handkerchief Moody and perhaps me as I'm construed in the book
are all dealing with dread in a certain way, an obsession with the darker hues
of human psychology.

GROSS: Why don't you choose a short section from the Hawthorne story, "The
Minister's Black Veil," and read it to us and tell us what's speaks to you
about this section.

Mr. MOODY: I'd be happy to.

GROSS: And I should mention that you reprint the story in the back of your
memoir, "The Black Veil."

Mr. MOODY: It's true. I actually thought--you know, my initial ambition was
to make the book sort of like Nabokov's great novel "Pale Fire," which is an
entire novel folded into commentary on the work of this poet, John Shades(ph).
So that was what got me excited initially. Here's a really great passage
which deals expressly with Hooper's decision-making process with respect to
the veil as he discusses it with his fiancee, Elizabeth(ph).

`"If I hide my face for sorrow, there is a cause enough," he merely replied.
"And if I cover it for secret sin, what mortal might not do the same?" And
with this gentle but unconquerable obstinacy did he resist all her entreaties.
At length, Elizabeth sat silent. For a few moments, she appeared lost in
thought considering probably what new methods might be tried to withdraw her
lover from so dark a fantasy which, if it had no other meaning, was perhaps a
symptom of mental disease. Though of a firmer character than his own, the
tears rolled down her cheeks, but in an instant as it were a new feeling took
the place of sorrow. Her eyes were fixed insensibly on the black veil when,
like a sudden twilight in the air, its terrors fell around her. She arose and
stood trembling before him.

`"And do you feel it then at last?" said he mournfully. She made no reply but
covered her eyes with her hand and turned to leave the room. He rushed
forward and caught her arm, "Have patience with me, Elizabeth," cried he
passionately. "Do not desert me though this veil must be between us here on
Earth, be mine and hereafter there shall be no veil over my face, no darkness
between our souls. It is but a mortal veil. It is not for eternity. Oh, you
know not how lonely I am and how frightened to be alone behind my black veil.
Do not leave me in this miserable obscurity forever." "Lift the veil but once
and look me in the face," said she. "Never, it cannot be," replied Mr.
Hooper. "Then farewell," said Elizabeth.'

GROSS: That's great. And what speaks to you, like, emotionally about that
or, you know, in terms of, like, what you feel your condition on Earth is?

Mr. MOODY: Well, you know, that's really what always attracted me to this
story. I mean, when I heard about this story, "The Minister's Black Veil,"
when I was a kid, I always thought it was sort of a cool thing that you would
tell other kids on the playground, you know, `Hey, I'm related to this guy
from a short story,' you know? But later when I started reading Hawthorne, it
began to sink in. You know, I was a teen-ager and sort of reading "The
Scarlett Letter" in English class and so forth, and then making that
determination that I was going to sort of go by myself and read this story and
see what it was all about, I was really overwhelmed by passages just like this
when it seemed to me what Hawthorne was driving at is that there's always a
lack in human relationships, always a concealment, always a way in which
language fails us. We're trying to sort of get through to the people we love,
make contact with them, and yet there are always these inhibitors that seem
built into just what it means to be human.

So I feel really that sort of almost Puritanical kind of heaviness of spirit
in this story, and I still sort of see it in the world. It's very much a part
of the contemporary writing that I've done and the novels that I've written,
as well as my own life.

GROSS: Now the description of the veil reminds me of your description of
melancholy in your book in which you describe melancholy as having a need to
consume the sufferer and, thus, needing layers and strata and veneers in
perpetuity in which to cloak and conceal itself. Melancholy attempts to avoid
detection. So I guess...

Mr. MOODY: Well...

GROSS: Yeah, go ahead.

Mr. MOODY: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, I think that's what's so interesting
in my experience with depression. There is a sense in which you aren't always
certain what it is exactly that you're suffering with. And there are
tendencies to feel perhaps that you're weak, that you're a moral failure in
some way or that you have other difficulties that are not medical in origin.
And I think, therefore, that it does conceal itself, that mental illness often
has this capacity for making it such that the suffer is the last person to
know. You know, you see that with alcoholism. I think you see it with, you
know, more acute complaints like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or
something. But I think that that concealment is a possibility in daily life
for people who aren't even suffering from depression, who are just sort of
going about life. You know, there's this awesome human capacity for recoiling
from self knowledge.

GROSS: While the reading of Hawthorne that you did is still fresh in our
minds, let me ask you if your writing in your new book was affected at all by
reading and re-reading Hawthorne, I mean, even simple things? Like instead of
saying `he said,' Hawthorne will write `said he' because I guess that was more
of the way of putting it at the time Hawthorne was writing. So did any of
those constructions affect you in the writing of the new book?

Mr. MOODY: I don't know if that particular construction did, but there are
definitely little Hawthorne kind of mannerisms that crept into my prose
throughout the book. For example, I think in the first chapter, I'm talking
about being on the subway and seeing this guy in the subway who used to sort
of haunt the end in the arlones(ph) in New York City with his face completely
covered. And I think I say, `I was purposed upon the subway,' or something
like that which is a classic Hawthorne construction. You know, he used
purposed that way all the time, but no contemporary writer really does it. I
tried to avoid aping his style excessively. You know, I've seen contemporary
novels and so forth who are writers take on a great classic and end up aping
it so extensively that it becomes mannered in a way. And I didn't want that
to happen, but by the same token, which American writer is not influenced by
Hawthorne. It's like not being influenced by Melville or Thoreau or
something. We've all read that work and it's out there. So I wanted to let a
little bit of it creep in because it would just make the book seem coherent
and, you know, organized in a methodical way.

GROSS: My guest is Rick Moody. His new book is called "The Black Veil: A
Memoir With Digressions." We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is Rick Moody and his new book is called "The Black Veil: A
Memoir With Digressions."

So when you decided to make connections between this ancestor who actually
wore a black veil and the Hawthorne story that is allegedly based on that
ancestor and to link that with your own depression, was it difficult to start
writing about yourself and your own feelings and experiences and your own
depression because what you usually write is fiction?

Mr. MOODY: Yeah, it was tremendously difficult. In fact, to be honest, there
was a point where I realize that though I felt the book needed this material
to be forthright and complete, I wasn't sure if I could do it. And I had
gotten in about a hundred pages or so, mostly material about my childhood and
my grandfather telling me about this story when I was kid, and I just
blanched. I couldn't do it for a while. And, in fact, my last book,
"Demonology," which was a collection of short stories was really written in
the middle of writing "The Black Veil" because I realized I was going to try
to write about my hospital experience and it was so upsetting for me to go
back to that time that I just decided I'd write short stories for
about--almost a year I did that instead. So it took a tremendous kind of
screwing up of courage to be able to do it. And it was finally only under
very particular circumstances and knowing that certain people were looking
forward to reading that work and were supportive of it that I was able to do
it. You know, it seems from my point of view--and I say this without, you
know, feeling boastful about it at all, but it seems fairly heroic that I
accomplished it at all.

GROSS: You know, in writing about this depression that you had that led you
to actually go to a hospital, you describe that in its onset, it reminded you
of certain feelings and even hallucinations that you had when you were taking
drugs. What were some of the connections you saw between the feelings of the
depression and the hallucinatory feelings from drugs?

Mr. MOODY: Well, I was thinking of a specific event. I mean, I took a lot
of--it's sort of sad and unfortunate to say it on the radio, but the truth is
that I took a lot of drugs when I was a teen-ager. That was something that I
was just involved with. And it really wasn't that great an idea for me
because I'm so sensitive, I think oversensitive, and so kind of acutely aware
of stuff that's going on around me with other people and so forth that I just
would pick up more energy and vibrations from a room than I think a person
should have in their head. And...

GROSS: Yeah. Uh-huh.

Mr. MOODY: ...you know, I could sort of get away with smoking pot
occasionally, although I often would think that everybody was talking about me
and that my skin was made out of plastic and that I couldn't breathe, and
stuff like that. So I often would experience these feelings of panic and so
forth. And it was quite a bit worse in instances when I took LSD, which I did
for a while. And on this one particular occasion, I had a really gigantically
bad trip, as they used to say, including basically artificial psychosis. I
was having really dramatic hallucinations, voices telling me to do things. I
mean, all the stuff that you really associate with schizophrenia.

And the hallucinations were all punitive. I mean, they were all about sort of
inflicting various torment and pain on me. And they reached their culmination
in this moment where I had, for lack of a better way of putting it, a sort of
actual visitation from God. And what I said to God was, `I need help.' I
mean, it was a really simple exchange between the two of us. I realized that
what I had been doing, taking a lot of drugs and feeling really sort of
estranged from society as a teen-ager, I realized that these things weren't
working. And I addressed this really primitive cry to the image of God in my
hallucination and I said, `I need help,' and God's reply was, `I can't help
you.'

And how much more dramatic of a kind of image could that be with respect to
Hawthorne and a history of the kind of Puritan strands of thinking in American
thought, in American contemporary identity? How much more pure an example
could I arrive at than that? That's very primal and very related to those
kinds of Puritan lines of thought.

GROSS: You know, before we go on, I'm just wondering, like, what is it that
gets someone who's having all these bad experiences on drugs to keep going
back for more? I mean, this is obviously something you wanted to investigate
about yourself as opposed to saying, `Boy, that was bad. I'm not going to do
that again.'

Mr. MOODY: Well, I think that what I had was addictive illness, and that
it's not really--you know, I wish I could say it was an investigation.
Although there are people who say--Jung, for example, I think, said that
alcoholism was a low-level search for God, you know. And I sort of think
maybe there's some truth in that. But with me, it had much more to do with
compulsion and an inability to make really clear decisions about drugs and, in
fact, most things that bring me pleasure. I'm sort of like the monkey with
the cocaine bar. I'll just press it until, you know, I get really sick. And
that's what happened to me then. It happens that I think there were some
kinds of investigation that were implicit in that, but I would like to say
that I was so smart as to know that then, but I don't think that's the truth.

GROSS: Rick Moody is the author of the new book "The Black Veil: A Memoir
With Digressions." He'll be back in the second half of the show. I'm Terry
Gross and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music; credits)

GROSS: Coming up, more on depression and writing with Rick Moody, author of
the new book "The Black Veil: A Memoir With Digressions."

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, back with writer Rick Moody. His
novels include "Purple America" and "The Ice Storm," which was adapted into a
film. His new book is called "The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions."
It's about the period when he was a young man taking drugs, drinking too much
and sinking into a depression that led to a stay in a psychiatric hospital.
The book also investigates a family myth about an ancestor who covered his
face with a veil out of guilt and remorse. The Nathaniel Hawthorne story,
"The Minister's Black Veil," was supposedly inspired by that ancestor's story.

When you were going through your depression that wasn't drug-induced, you
know, without hallucinogenics...

Mr. MOODY: Yeah.

GROSS: ...were there images that you were having then or hallucinations that
were not unlike what you had with LSD?

Mr. MOODY: Well, the first thing I would say is that my later depression was
not exactly free of drugs, which is to say that what happened to me after
taking LSD is that I just realized that I was a really bad person with respect
to hallucinations. I was just not a good target for hallucinogens in general.
I wasn't going to be a good pot head. I wasn't going to be a good acid head,
so I started drinking and what I really did was drink and take Quaaludes and
take downs, take drugs that anesthetize you for a good 10 years after that.

And the depression that I had and the difficulties of that period
were--coincided with the tail end of my being able to drink. I had drunk a
lot and it wasn't working anymore. And alcohol, you'll recall, is a
depressant in the first case, so if you drink a lot and get depressed and
drink more on top of that depression, it just really is an express train to a
very bad place.

But it's also true that I did experience disordered thinking and sort of
obsessive, morbid thinking at that time, which while not--I didn't have really
the same kinds of hallucinations, I definitely had really bad thoughts, and
that they were involved with sort of various punitive escapades being visited
upon me by, you know, dark agents of the soul, and so forth. In short, among
other things, I developed this obsession that I was going to be sexually
assaulted.

GROSS: It's an interesting obsession to have because it's, I think, mostly
women who live in fear of rape, and I think it's interesting that you were
living in fear of that.

Mr. MOODY: Yeah. I find it interesting, too, when I'm not finding it so sad.

GROSS: Mm-hmm. Do you have any insights why rape was the thing that was
obsessing you?

Mr. MOODY: Well, the answer, in the context of the book, and I think it's
actually an answer probably in my personality, too, is that the whole sort of
history of kind of puritan dread and remorse and obsession with conscience in
America, I think comes along the paternal line; it's a kind of patrimony. And
what I think that I was really fearing was sort of being assaulted by my
forefathers, in a way, by that whole masculine kind of program which indicates
that as a writer, as a person, as a man I should have been doing better,
working harder, doing more, pulling myself up by my bootstraps, not
complaining, getting on with life, being a tougher guy, etc. So it was kind
of a metaphysical patrimony that I think was being visited on me.

GROSS: Do you think that real-life pathologies are as metaphorical as what
you just described?

Mr. MOODY: Well, I'm a writer so, right, there it is.

GROSS: A writer.

Mr. MOODY: Yes.

GROSS: You know, you write in your book: `If you are remorseful by nature,
you believe that a great evil will befall you no matter which way you turn.'

Mr. MOODY: Mm.

GROSS: Did you think of your fears as being connected to remorse?

Mr. MOODY: By the way, I just wanted to say that that line you quoted, that's
a line that's manifestly Hawthorne-like and, yeah, I wrote it myself.

GROSS: Yeah, yeah.

Mr. MOODY: That was actually me at that spot.

Did I actually think that that was really going to happen to me? Yeah, I sort
of did, you know? But the truth is that I feel that I had alcoholism along
with my depression and that I think alcoholism has remorse built into it,
because you always have a secret life. You know, I was sort of sneaking
around, hiding drinks, getting into a lot of kinds of trouble that I wasn't
telling people about. I wasn't telling my parents, I wasn't telling my
siblings, I wasn't even telling the woman I lived with, in fact, and that kind
of secret life always breeds remorse. It breeds this kind of guilt and shame
about who you are and what you're up to.

GROSS: When your depression got so bad that you needed to be
institutionalized, did you check yourself in? Did you kind of shop for the
right place to go? Or did somebody else put you there?

Mr. MOODY: It's sort of an interesting story, actually. It was kind of an
inadvertent circumstance. The woman I was in love with and living with at the
time also had a really bad drinking problem, and she had elected to go to
rehab and so she went upstate to this rehab. And as part of her treatment,
family of the person being treated were invited to come up and spend a
five-day family therapy seminar on site, and so she asked me if I wanted to
come.

We'd had a lot of problems already by that point and it wasn't clear if we
were going to stay together, but I decided to go anyhow. And as part of the
trip and as part of the seminar you were asked to abstain from drink and drugs
during the period that you were there, which I had never abstained from
drinking for five days before, so this was kind of a big deal for me.

And I went up there and so I was sort of detoxing while I was there, and I
definitely had night sweats and I wasn't sleeping, not to mention that there
was this tremendous difficulty of what was going to happen to our relationship
and whether we were going to stay together, and all of that was being
connected in public.

You know, we would sit down and there would be counselors around us and they
would parse grammatically every sentence that passed between us and so forth.
So although they were well-meaning and tremendously effective, it was also a
little bit like being brainwashed for me, because I was clean for the first
time and, you know, we were there for eight hours a day and stuff, and I
started to come unglued, you know, I really did. I was depressed. I was
having trouble working, sort of functioning at all, and I was trying to show
up for this family therapy business.

So at the end of it her counselor came to me in the hall and said, `What do
you want us to do for you?' And I said, `I don't want you to do anything for
me.' You know, what I thought was, `Leave me the heck alone. That's what I
want you to do with me.' And she said, `I can see there's something really
wrong here and I think you want to do something about it. Tell me what you
want to do.' And I just said to her, `I just don't want to be so unhappy,'
you know?

And it was a dramatic moment for me, because I had never really made a bright
decision in my life when faced with real trouble. I'd always chosen the bad
way out. I had always sort of said, `Leave me alone' and then went to the bar
or something like that, you know? So it was a rare moment of seeing the
possibility that something much better could happen. And very quickly in
rapid order this counselor made it really easy for me to get a month off from
work and get my insurance to back me for a rehab stint.

And I got into this van with this guy 'cause I had said to them, `I need
psychiatric care wherever I go.' So I got into this van and the guy just took
off across New York state with the Mets playing on the radio and it was about
a week before Dwight Gooden checked into rehab, too. And I wound up at this
hospital in Queens.

GROSS: My guest is Rick Moody. His new book is called "The Black Veil: A
Memoir with Digressions." We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is Rick Moody. His new book is called "The Black Veil: A
Memoir with Digressions." It's, in part, about when he was a young man,
drinking too much and very depressed.

When you were in the hospital for depression, what did you respond to and what
didn't you respond to in the treatment? And I ask this because, I mean,
you're somebody who's very smart and analytical and thinks in very literary,
metaphorical ways and you use language so well. Some people can, like, use
language as a shield against any kind of verbal therapy.

Mr. MOODY: Yeah, there's a really good story along this line. I think it's
in the book, actually. They asked me to write an essay on--it's really funny,
actually. They asked me to write an essay on self-esteem, you know, and I was
like maybe three years out of undergraduate school where I had studied French
critical theory and deconstruction and stuff. So I wrote this essay on what
self-esteem is that had all these metaphors about Chinese communism and stuff,
and it was really long and Baroque and byzantine.

And I went into the room, which was full of like--there was a doorman from New
York and there was, you know, a young Dominican woman from Queens whose only
job had been in fast food and--you know, they were just regular people--and I
read this thing to them--it was like a page and half long--and I finished and
there was this just sort of dumb silence for a minute and then they descended
on me, you know, as with knives and just said, `You can't really expect us to
take this seriously. This is just nonsense,' you know? So whoever the
counselor was or the therapist at that session made me go and do it over
again.

So I really tried the second time through just to sort of not resort to my,
you know, fairly Baroque intellectual nonsense and just sort of tell the truth
for a change, you know, that I had always felt badly about myself no matter my
accomplishments and my education and that the only good times really in my
life had been moments when I had felt a real keen sense of community, you
know? And that, too, was sort of a breakthrough moment; it really helped me
out a lot. I'm glad they did it to me, in fact.

GROSS: Was that a good exercise for you as a writer also?

Mr. MOODY: Well, you know, I still have the essay and I wouldn't say it's
written in the high Rick Moody style by any means. But, you know, maybe it's
true that "The Black Veil" itself in some ways is a kind of more discursive
and quite a bit longer example of that exercise, which is to say that
sometimes by trying to tell the truth, even if this book it's sometimes in a
kind of serpentine way, by telling the truth you get closer to people and good
things come from it.

GROSS: How much do you have to deal with depression now? The depression you
write about was from, I think, 1987.

Mr. MOODY: Yeah. You know, I'm much better now. I don't drink anymore and
I've managed to stay out of a lot of that kind of misbehaving, and as a
result--you know, I get down the way other people get down, but I bounce a lot
faster. You know, it'll go for three or five days or something and then
usually I'm OK. I think of myself basically as fairly lighthearted now.

GROSS: OK. When you write now, what motivates you as a writer? Is it the
need to write? Is it the need to earn money? Is it the need to fulfill your
book contract? Like, when you're sitting there and writing, what's pushing
you to do it?

Mr. MOODY: Love of language. It's really simple. I mean, I actually find a
little bit the responsibility of making books or making book-length narratives
burdensome, but what I still love and feel really enthusiastic about is making
the perfect paragraph, just coming up with sentences which arranged in a
certain order just deliver that sense of delight that you get from like a
Nabokov paragraph or a Montaigne paragraph or a Don DeLillo paragraph, you
know, just human thought, human emotions expressed in the perfect kinds of
rhythms; that's what I love.

GROSS: Now you told us that when it came to, say, drinking or doing drugs
that you were really very compulsive. How does that compulsion figure into
your personality as a writer? And as a writer is the compulsion a help or a
hindrance?

Mr. MOODY: You know, that's a really interesting question and I think it's
both now, you know? "The Black Veil" itself is an example of a certain kind
of compulsive thinking, because I keep trying to go off in different
directions in the book and I keep coming back again and again to this image of
the guy putting the veil on his face, you know, for whatever reason he does
it.

Why does he do it? Does he do it for this reason or that reason? It's a kind
of obsessive recasting again and again and again of this instant. What
happened at the moment he put this garment on his face? And what did it feel
like to him to say, `I don't want anybody to look at my face anymore'? You
know, this is 320 pages of a guy putting that veil on over and over and over,
trying to make it perceptible to you, the reader, to make it so that you can
feel like what it felt like to handkerchief Moody at that instant. That's
compulsive in a way.

You know, it would be better if I could write a real sort of well-put-together
novel that takes you a lot of places like Jonathan Franzen or something, but
instead I have this cyclical need to sort of investigate stuff, pry the lid
off, look in the can of worms again, pour the worms out, stir them around, put
them back in the can and then go through the whole thing over again. It's
terrifying in a way. I think at the end you learn something--the reader
learns something; I learn something from writing these books, but sometimes I
wish I were otherwise.

GROSS: In writing your new memoir in which you kind of tell the truth,
although there's a lot of veils, I think, within the book, too, and the truth
is kind of very elaborately structured. Nevertheless, in this process of
talking about yourself and talking about your own emotional experiences and
melancholies, did that process change your life in any way or change your
relationships in any way?

Mr. MOODY: Well, that probably remains to be seen. I mean, I really looked
at this whole narrative of getting out and being on the road and talking about
the book as the moment in which the book itself becomes actualized and I get
to see what it really means. I think that it was really important for me
ultimately to try to write about my hospital experience, because it enabled me
to put that away finally.

I managed to get all of my records and to really look over everything that
happened to me then, which I had not done since 1987. And I really went
through that period and I saw it again and I saw that I wasn't a bad kid. You
know, I was really trying to get better and that that was honorable. It was
good for me to try to get better, you know, and it was good for me to write
about that and see that that kid was earnest. For all his difficulties, he
was earnest.

And I think probably that I'll end up looking back on this book--and
notwithstanding the, you know, potential for the occasional bad review or
people who don't understand its veiled, layered quality, I think I'll look
back and see that this was a really good exercise for me, too, that it really
did help me say, you know, `I went through a bad patch and it's OK, I'm that
person, I'm not ashamed of it, and now I can go forward and write some more
fiction.'

GROSS: Gee, what was it like to read your doctor's analyses of what you were
like in 1987 when you were suffering with depression?

Mr. MOODY: I'll tell you, one really good story about it, Terry, is that when
I got to the hospital, you know, there's this sort of famous list of questions
they always ask you in the admitting interview in psychiatric hospitals and
it's to see essentially how bad your mental illness is and whether or not
you're schizophrenic. And the classic question they ask you is: `What brings
you to the hospital?' Because schizophrenics always will say, `a van,' or `an
ambulance,' because they're not capable of metaphorical thinking at all, you
know? But another one of the questions they ask you is: `Who's the president
of the United States?' And this was '87 so I guess Reagan was president.

And, you know, I was depressed, you know, I was detoxing, I had had a drinking
problem. I was sort of in bad shape, but I certainly was not going to get
caught up seeming like I didn't know who the president was. So I named them
backwards from Reagan as far back as I could get, which I think was to
Franklin Roosevelt. So I went back pretty far and I felt kind of pleased with
myself. And when my therapist and I got the file with all the materials in it
about my period in the hospital, the admitting interview said: `Possible
pathological narcissism.'

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. MOODY: And I think it was because of that, because I had done that, you
know, sort of shown off that I could name all the presidents.

GROSS: And did you think of it as just testing yourself?

Mr. MOODY: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I was just being a brat about it, you
know, but--yeah.

Mercifully, they ruled out pathological narcissism.

GROSS: My guest is Rick Moody. His new book is called "The Black Veil: A
Memoir with Digressions." We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: Rick Moody is my guest and he's the author of "The Ice Storm," which
was made into a movie, "Purple America," a collection of short stories called
"Demonology" and a new book called "The Black Veil: A Memoir with
Digressions."

You've said about yourself that, `Since I'm a failed musician, music is always
pretty close to me when I'm working.' Changing the subject a bit here, what
music did you fail at?

Mr. MOODY: Well, I played piano. I'm not really that good at it, but I can
play it. And I've taught myself guitar. And I actually was sort of a not-bad
boy soprano. I mean, I had really a great voice and I took voice lessons and
so forth. I didn't keep up with that. I played, you know, rock 'n' roll in
bands and stuff in college, but I never became a professional musician. I
just got better at being a writer, so I kept doing that.

But I know a lot about music. I think for a layperson who doesn't read music
that well--I can read a little bit--but leaving that aside, I know really a
lot about music, and so it's always right adjacent to what I'm doing. And, in
fact, what I said about paragraphs and construction of paragraphs, to me,
that's a musical process. I think about rhythm in a paragraph the way I think
about a John Coltrane solo or about a Bach fugue or something like that.

GROSS: Now you actually wrote lyrics to a few songs on a new CD by the
singer/songwriter Jim Roll. How did that collaboration come about?

Mr. MOODY: He just wrote to me, actually, out of the blue, as he had done
also with Denis Johnson and, you know, he just said, `I love your work and,
you know, I'm going to send you some of my CDs,' you know. And other people
have done this. I've written lyrics probably for, I think, four or five
musicians now, and I've even collaborated on the music with some people. I
mean, I am able to do the whole thing.

And I didn't expect that I was going to like Jim's records at first, I mean,
'cause I didn't know him or anything. And he sent along the CDs and I really
felt that he was a kindred spirit and that we were working the same side of
the street. And I just loved the material, so I thought, `I'll give this guy
a shot.' And what I actually was strip lyrics off of songs that I had already
tried to write myself and hadn't gotten that far with and just said, `If you
can make anything out of these, they're all yours.'

GROSS: Well, I thought we could close with one of those songs, and this is
called "Blue Guitar." Would you say something about the inspiration for the
lyric?

Mr. MOODY: Well, this is really a sad lyric in that it's about my sister's
death, after my sister died. She was a guitar player. And we had her guitar
around for a while, and then through sort of circumstances that don't merit
going into at any length, the guitar was sort of legally enjoined to be given
away to someone else, and so we lost the guitar. I'd had it and it had her
handwritten chord charts and hymns that she had been singing and stuff all
were in there and now they're all gone.

GROSS: What did she die of?

Mr. MOODY: Of a sort of a freak heart failure thing that had to do with a
really common heart condition called mitral valve prolapse that everybody has,
or many people have.

GROSS: Mm-hmm.

Mr. MOODY: It's not supposed to end like that, but sometimes it does.

GROSS: Mm. This is all stuff you would have no clue about just hearing the
song.

Mr. MOODY: I know.

GROSS: Is that OK?

Mr. MOODY: But it's not a bad song.

GROSS: Right. Right.

Mr. MOODY: I mean, I like kinds of work where there are emotional situations
that are under the surface that just bubble up in really veiled ways, as it
were. I like that there are things like that.

GROSS: OK. Rick Moody, thank you so much for talking with us.

Mr. MOODY: Thanks, Terry.

GROSS: And Rick Moody's new book is called "The Black Veil: A Memoir with
Digressions."

And here's the song we were talking about. The lyric is by Rick Moody, and
the music is my Jim Roll. It's on Roll's new CD. It's called "Blue Guitar."

(Soundbite of "Blue Guitar")

Mr. JIM ROLL: (Singing) Strings were frayed on your guitar, the nylon
strings, the busted case. The frets had pried themselves away; the capo, too,
was stuck in place. D's and A's and G's and E's, worn the way you held them
down. The picks had all been rounded off. The pitch pipe made a buzzing
sound. And we gave away your blue guitar. We gave away your blue guitar. We
gave away your blue guitar. I wonder where you are.

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.

(Soundbite of "Blue Guitar")

Mr. ROLL: (Singing) Bused to a house in New Orleans; Tuesdays you had lesson
time. Drunken sailors came around. You warbled out beginners' round. But we
gave away your blue guitar. We gave away your blue guitar. Yeah, we gave
away your blue guitar, but we wonder how you are.

Stowed behind the summer clothes, boxed with photocopied hymns, dusty like a
vanished youth, that instrument of seraphim.

(Credits)

GROSS: Writer Alec Wilkinson has written a new memoir about his mentor, the
late writer William Maxwell. Maxwell was a longtime editor at The New Yorker.
On the next FRESH AIR we listen back to interviews with Maxwell and Wilkinson.

I'm Terry Gross. Join us for the next FRESH AIR.
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