"I have worked really hard to defy categorization, to break down a taxonomy whenever it comes my way." -- Rick Moody
Rick Moody (born Hiram Frederick Moody III, October 18, 1961) is 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 widespread acclaim, became a bestseller, and was made into a feature film of the same title.
"All the stuff that I used to treat with contempt - you know, I'm an artist, man, I don't do that family stuff - has begun to seem really important.""But that incessant drive to be out there in the literary universe that was important to me when I was in my twenties, like going to a Paris Review party or whatever, that seems totally irrelevant now.""Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem.""I always wanted to write something illustrated, and the Details strip finally gave me the opportunity.""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 didn't know how to kill off a character unless I was able, as a narrator, to get really complicated. Because it was a big deal. I'd never killed a character before.""I judged about a zillion awards this year so I've been reading a lot of books that just came out.""I love comic books and always did as a kid.""I made this list of stuff that it's time for me to try to do.""I suppose I should say that I treasure blasphemy, as a faith of the highest order.""I turned forty, and I'm finally going to get married and maybe have a kid.""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.""Impotence, fetishism, bisexuality, and bondage are all facts of life, and our fiction should reflect that.""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.""It's also true, however, that having conquered the regional writer ghetto, I am now intent on conquering the nationalist writer ghetto and moving out into the world more.""Literature precedes genre.""Maybe when I'm sixty-five I'll talk about my literary life.""My contention is that that style is just as stylized as an ornate style.""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.""Nonfiction that uses novelistic devices and strategies to shape the work. That's material that I really like.""So while it is true that I find really dark stuff funny sometimes, it's also true that as a writer of books I want to have the whole range of human emotions.""The Ice Storm, because of the movie, has had, or is to have, a vigorous life in other cultures.""The point is to balance on the edge between musicality and content.""The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is hardwired into my personality.""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.""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.""Writing the book was itself a process of concealing and revealing."
Moody was born in New York City and grew up in several of the Connecticut suburbs, including Darien and New Canaan, where he later set stories and novels. He graduated from St. Paul's School in New Hampshire and Brown University.
He received a Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University in 1986; nearly two decades later he would criticize the program in an essay in The Atlantic Monthly. Soon after finishing his thesis, he checked himself into a mental hospital for alcoholism. Once sober and while working for Farrar, Straus and Giroux, he wrote his first novel, Garden State, about young people growing up in the industrial wasteland of northern New Jersey, where he was living at the time. In his introduction to a reprint of the novel, he called it the most "naked" thing he has written. Garden State won the Pushcart Editor's Choice Award.
In 2006, Arizona State Senator Thayer Verschoor cited complaints he had received about The Ice Storm as part of the reason he supported a measure allowing students to refuse assignments they find "personally offensive." Verschoor said that "There’s no defense of this book. I can’t believe that anyone would come up here and try to defend that kind of material," although eventually numerous professors did just that.
His memoir The Black Veil (2002) won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. He has also received the Addison Metcalf Award, the Paris Review Aga Khan Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Conjunctions, Harper's, Details, The New York Times, and Grand Street.
The Diviners was released in 2005. Little, Brown and Company, the publisher of The Diviners, changed the cover after the galleys came out because women reacted negatively to it. The original cover showed a Conan the Barbarian-type image in technicolor orange; the new cover uses that same image, but frames it as a scene on a movie screen.
The Diviners was followed in 2007 by Right Livelihoods, a collection of three novellas published in Britain and Ireland as The Omega Force.
The Four Fingers of Death was released July 28, 2010 by Little, Brown and Company.
In addition to his fiction, Moody is a musician and composer. He belongs to a group called the Wingdale Community Singers, which he describes as performing "woebegone and slightly modernist folk music, of the very antique variety." Moody composed the song "Free What's-his-name", performed by Fly Ashtray on their 1997 EP Flummoxed,
