I felt honored to be at Mary’s bedside, as I have so often felt honored to be among Laurel’s family. And the night after her death, Laurel and I drove out to Cannon Beach, where I had proposed to her, and spent the night in a hotel, one of those nights when all of the stark and unvarnished truths of life are obvious to you, but where love is mostly possible too. We’d been there with Mary less than a year before, just ten days after the embryonic Theo had been transferred in Trumbull, Connecticut, and the stairs on the back side of our hotel led directly down to Haystack Rock, that primordial place, with its funnel cloud of seabirds, and its skeins of fog, with its ancient geological riddles and immensities, and in the half-light of that evening it was hard not to feel Mary with us, both of us lucky to be there with our son.
Note
CHAPTER 12
1. “When I left the house it was still dark. A friend, before he died, said, ‘Home is waiting in the dark for us to come home.’ But what if you don’t recognize your home? And what if you feel at home nowhere? Or is a better question: What would it take to make a place feel like home? It would be nice if there were blueberry bushes lining the road, and maybe, in a nearby field, raspberry canes. A girl could learn to pick them without getting poked. A father could show his young daughter how. That would be in summer, of course. In winter: the pond out back of the house would freeze over, and a girl would ice skate with her father to the music one plays while gliding on ice—Stravinsky the obvious choice, or anything that makes a body lean to one side, then the other, in concert across a pond.”
Also by Rick Moody
FICTION
Garden State
The Ice Storm
The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven
Purple America
Demonology
The Diviners
Right Livelihoods
The Four Fingers of Death
Hotels of North America
NONFICTION
Joyful Noise: The New Testament Revisited (co-edited with Darcey Steinke)
The Black Veil
About the Author
Rick Moody was born in New York City. He attended Brown and Columbia Universities. He is the author of the award-winning memoir The Black Veil and of the novels Hotels of North America, The Four Fingers of Death, Purple America, The Ice Storm, Garden State, and multiple collections of short fiction. Moody is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, and his work has been anthologized in Best American Stories, Best American Essays, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. He lives in Rhode Island. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
January–September 2013
October 2013
December 2013
January 2014
February 2014
March 2014
April 2014
May 2014
June 2014
July 2014
August 2014
September 2014
October 2014
Afterword: Winter and Spring, 2014–2015
Note
Also by Rick Moody
About the Author
Copyright
THE LONG ACCOMPLISHMENT. Copyright © 2019 by Rick Moody. All rights reserved. For information, address Henry Holt and Co., 120 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10271.
Cover design by Nicolette Seeback. Cover photographs courtesy of the author.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: Moody, Rick, author.
Title: The long accomplishment: a memoir of hope and struggle in matrimony / Rick Moody.
Description: First edition. | New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018044743 | ISBN 9781627798440 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Moody, Rick—Marriage. | Authors, American—20th century—Biography.
Classification: LCC PS3563.O5537 Z46 2019 | DDC 813/.54 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018044743
e-ISBN 9781627798433
First Edition: August 2019
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