Memoir: The Black Veil

I picked up Rick Moody's memoir, The Black Veil, after I heard an interview with him on CBC radio. As a past sufferer of depression, I'm always interested in reading about other writers who have dealt with mental health issues and addiction, and I was intrigued to find out about Moody's experience in a rehab/psychiatric hospital.

The book is subtitled "A Memoir with Digressions", and the digressions have to do with Moody's investigation of a key figure in his family history, Joseph "Handkerchief" Moody, the man on whom Nathaniel Hawthorne based his short story "The Minister's Black Veil." The writing is very lyrical and stylized, with long sentences and repetitive turns of phrase, and Moody seems to obscure more than he reveals, in keeping with the symbol of the black veil that he explores from many angles:

Maybe it's simply the case that concealment is essential to identity, that, notwithstanding the cultural trends toward reality-based programming, notwithstanding talk shows and talk radio and their confessional opportunities, we need a part of us that will never be known, so that the more we reveal, the more we are enveloped in veils, layers that refuse to be known, additional integuments of guilt and concealment, such that any memoir is a fiction, an arranged narrative, a bildungsroman, just as many fictions are veiled memoirs; the two identities, the two narrative strategies, concealing and revealing, depending upon and excluding each other by turns.

Drawn in as I was by the book, I learned more about Moody's search for identity than I did about his panic attacks and depression, which were described, but not ascribed meaning. Perhaps a refreshing change from "triumph over adversity" narratives that presume to make sense of every experience. I appreciated how Moody presented a corner of his life and remained almost as mystified by it as the reader.

Then, halfway through my reading, I discovered that this was the book that Dale Peck reviewed for The New Republic, in which he so infamously skewered the author with the opening line, "Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation." I'm thankful that I had forgotten or not made the connection, since it allowed me to come to the work fresh and make my own judgment.

Rereading Peck's review, I am reminded again of how much writing is a matter of taste. One reason I don't like writing reviews is that I don't enjoy critiquing books that are well written but not to my personal liking. They don't speak to where I'm at, but that doesn't mean that they won't appeal to others.

And as writers, I believe this issue of taste helps us take criticism or bad reviews in better spirit. Once we have achieved a certain skill or standard of quality, any rejection beyond that simply means that the work has not found its true audience. Even Peck admits as much:

The Black Veil asks us to consider its subject — the aforementioned Hiram Frederick Moody III, a.k.a. Rick — as a postmodern tragic hero, ironic as well as iconic, America's Battered Inner Child-cum-Messianic Storyteller. Every page practically cries out: love me despite my flaws.

Well, I don't. Perhaps this denotes a failure of empathy on my part, or an indication that I am not the intended audience for Moody's musings.

Whatever else it might be, The Black Veil is a truly original product of its author. And at this moment in time, it was a narrative that I connected with. Your mileage may vary.