Activity

What else could I be? I guess to be an American writer means, uh, that I have dined multiply at drive-through windows and that I have no choice but to occasionally darken the inside of a shopping mall, and that I come from a country of former slave-owners, and that I feel the Manhattan Project as a…

When I was on tour people would say, I’m so sorry about your mother, as if the work was transparently autobiographical. But my mother is in the pink, and grateful for many things, except for the fact that she has a writer for a son. You’re correct that writing about sons and mothers is deeply deman…

INTERVIEWER

Do you have a daily schedule you try to stick to when you’re working?

MOODY

No. I’m against schedules. Write when you feel excited by the prospect. Otherwise, don’t bother. Break your deadlines, default on your due dates, wander in the streets, go to the movies, eat lavishly, f…

INTERVIEWER

What traditions are behind your writing?

MOODY

The modernist notion that anything is possible, the postmodernist notion that everything is exhausted, the post-postmodernist notion that since everything is exhausted, everything is permitted.

Once, when he lost himself in the details of Wes’s passing—the helicopter airlifting Wes’s body from the bend in the road where the RV had struck him and where a hole in his head had opened and bled and refused to close-Harper had spilled an entire tray of huevos rancheros for a table of very disap…