Article: Q: Care to comment on...

Q: Care to comment on the The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions?

A: Will I get paid? Will I feel better about myself? Will my parents respect me? Or will they feel that I've violated their trust somehow, by spilling tales of childhood, by storing up tales of childhood and then spilling them, by remembering, by watching, by watching and not saying anything, by being the sort of child on whom things appeared to be lost but actually were not? Will my parents respect me for the memoir that is part of The Black Veil and for talking about The Black Veil? Or would it be better if I had done neither thing, neither written the book in the first place nor spoke about it? Assuming that it is now too late to suppress The Black Veil, would it be better if I didn't say anything at all about it? So as not to add garrulity to indiscretion? Wouldn't it be better if I just let it speak for itself? How to talk around the fact of my checkered past, e.g., without having to talk directly about it?

Assuming that some interviewer is going to ask me really personal questions on the subject, wouldn't it be better if I somehow prepared for these questions? Oughtn't I to say Okay, I was not a sturdy person when I was younger, but you might as well just read the book, because it's all in there and anyway I'm a better writer than I am talker? And do I have to answer the question about why I wrote the book? I never particularly chose to write any of my books, isn't that the fact of the matter? Isn't it the case that all the books with my name on them somehow wrote me? Isn't it the case that this is one of the amazing things about my job? Isn't even this an example of how words, when applied to a problem, inevitably articulate the speaker in some way? So shouldn't I say that no work was actually written by me (at least if these words are meant to indicate perfect mastery over the material)? That there isn't some great reason why I chose to write a certain book and not some other work?

Or perhaps I should say that the choice of work is not a choice, but is in some way a fixed, determined matter, a condition of the universe? And therefore isn't it true that the structure of this particular book, which is not a very easy structure, nor a straightforward linear structure, but, rather, a discontinuous, circular, non-linear structure, isn't it true that this structure was not chosen either but is more a characteristic or inclination of the person who wrote the book, namely me? Isn't all work, all literature, an aspect of the identity of its author? But is identity really easy to get to? Or is it something that is revealed in certain instances and concealed in others? Isn't veiling, as in the title of the book about which I'm ostensibly speaking, a part of being?

So that in one instant we appear to be revealing ourselves-in interviews, on talk shows, on the telephone with friends-while, at the same moment, we are concealing-always assuming layers of privacy, always concealing disagreeable parts of our past, even as we appear to be getting nearer? So that there's this double action, in the book, in my personality, in this interview-and in your personality too, in which you reveal and conceal at the same time; there are two obverses of you, as with me, as with all books, all civilization, the one in the process of presenting and inventing self, the other in the process of sweeping that self away.

Forgive me if I refuse to be the expert, because I'd rather that you made up your mind about my book, in the private space of reading. On the subway, or in bed before sleep, or on vacation, or in the waiting room of a doctor's office, or one Sunday morning as the sun comes up.

Copyright © Rick Moody