Black Veil - Softcover

In his early 20s, having already lived a lifetime of excess, Rick Moody found himself stranded suddenly in a depression so profound that he feared for his life. A stay in a psychiatric hospital was just the first step out of his mental illness. Here, Moody tells the story of his collapse and recovery, in an inspired journey through what it means to feel young and confused; then older and confused; guilty, lost, and finally healed. Woven through his own story, Moody also traces his family's paternal line, looking for clues to his own melancholy - in particular to one ancestor, Reverend Joseph Moody, about whom Nathaniel Hawthorn wrote an archetypal study of shame entitled "The Minister's Black Veil".

Rick Moody was born in New York City and studied at Brown University and Columbia University. He has attracted considerable attention and received lavish praise for four books: Garden State (1992) (winner of the Pushcart Press Editors' Book Award), The Ice Storm (1994) (Ang Lee directed a film version released in 1997), Purple America (1997), heralded as Book of the Year by both the New York Times and New York Post and, most recently, his highly acclaimed collection of short stories, Demonology.$$$In 1998, Moody received the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2000, he received a Guggenheim fellowship. His short work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Harper's, Esquire, the Paris Review, The Atlantic and he is a regular contributor to the on-line magazine, McSweeneys. He has taught at the State University of New York at Purchase, the Bennington Writing Seminars, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the New School for Social Research. He lives on Fishers Island, New York.$$$His most recent book The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions, was published by Faber in August 2002.