Rick Moody’s New Book Takes on Marriage, for Better and for Worse

“In order to have a second marriage you can believe in,” begins Rick Moody in The Long Accomplishment, “you may have to fail at your first marriage. I failed spectacularly at mine.” In this, his second memoir, Moody comes clean about his resistance to monogamy and an adult life marked by sexual compulsivity, self-destructiveness, and “a long list of regrets.” But something shifts in him around the time he meets visual artist Laurel Nakadate, and when they decide to get married, he is prepared to commit to the vows of marriage with someone he deeply loves.

As soon as their marriage begins there are troubles, but this time the nature of the troubles is external to his marriage: the ongoing “contaminating” legal matters of his divorce; deaths and health crises of loved ones; some terrible situations involving his homes; and a long, soul-crushing struggle with infertility. How much can early marriage withstand, and how can hardship teach of the strength that marriage offers? The Long Accomplishment offers an answer to this question: It is a raw and candid account of the power of committed love to combat life’s sorrows.

I spoke with Rick Moody about marriage, artistic collaboration, infertility, and how he approached the structure of memoir when writing The Long Accomplishment.

The Millions: The basic structure of The Long Accomplishment is the first year of your second marriage, told in chronological order, each chapter organized by a month in this year. Beyond this framework, what thought did you give to structure as you embarked upon this project?

With my prior memoir, , I had a lot of thoughts about the nonfiction novel, the way, e.g., that tried to structure certain nonfiction works as though they were novels, and about the whole theory of formal hybridizing between and among the genres, between fiction and nonfiction. These were really rewarding ways to think about memoir writing for me, but in the case of I didn’t want to overthink or to labor for an idea of form. I wanted to tell the story, because the story was most of what I was thinking about in 2015 to 2016, when I first really started bearing down on the manuscript. I didn’t want to have a structure that called undue attention to itself. I have done that a lot in the past, preoccupying myself with forms, but I have sort of been repenting of it lately, trying to locate near at hand forms that are more organic. So in this case, beyond the chronological, there weren’t really many ideas about form, though it was a sort of solidifying and emulsifying thought that a solid year was the form chosen by a certain 19-century transcendentalist for his memoir. In my case, the calendar year was also a valid form because I really was talking about a year, from my wedding day to the dark events of exactly one year later. The form was natural, at hand, and pretty obvious, and that seemed valid enough to me.