The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions

by Rick Moody | Parenting & Families |
ISBN: 0316578991 Global Overview for this book
Registered by nillabreen of Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts USA on 11/30/2003
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5 journalers for this copy...
Journal Entry 1 by nillabreen from Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts USA on Sunday, November 30, 2003
This is near the base of my TBR mountain. I'm sending it on a bookring so it can be read in the meantime. I bought it because it's a book I'd like to read someday... I just don't know when that day will come...

from flap:

While still in his twenties, Rick Moody found that a decade of alcohol, drugs, and other indulgences had left him stranded in a depression so severe that he feared for his life. The road of excess led, for him, not to the palace of wisdom but rather to a psychiatric hospital in one of New York's least exalted boroughs.

The Black Veil is Rick Moody's account of that debilitating passage in his life. It is the powerfully written story of a mind unraveling, and of how it feels when the underpinnings of life fall away. The anxieties of early adulthood, of first finding a place in the world - the weight placed upon that first relationship, first job, first apartment - are presented here with enormous sympathy. Anyone who has ever felt his or her own psychological footing slip, even briefly, will find Moody's account of his breakdown and return both harrowing and heartbreaking.

At the same time,
The Black Veil is an astonishing exploration of guilt, blame, the public face, and the very idea of self. Looking for clues to his lifelong sense of melancholy and shame, and recognizing signs of this same condition in his family's paternal line, Moody embarked on a search for its origins. This quest begins with fathers and grandfathers. It ventures through stone quarries in Connecticut, among mossy tombstones in Maine, into the coded diary of a tormented Puritan minister, and into the life and writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne. In these and dozens of other places, Moody finds gleaming pieces of the past, and he waves of them an inspired portrait of what it means to be young and confused, older and confused, guilty, lost, and finally healed.

Funny, sad, and blazingly inventive, The Black Veil is another work of audacious originality by one of the most thoughtful writers of our time.

Journal Entry 2 by nillabreen from Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts USA on Monday, December 1, 2003
When you receive this book, please make a journal entry to let everyone know that you have received it. After you read the book, please make another journal entry with your comments. Send a private message (pm) to the next person on the list to get their address. If that person doesn't reply, try sending another message, but if they don't reply within a week, please skip that person and contact the next one. The skipped person can get back into the ring later by contacting me. Try to keep the ring moving, but don't read the book so quickly that you don't enjoy it. Thanks for joining the ring! Happy reading!


  • spaceystacey (New Jersey, ship international) ...read
  • smiely (Florida, ship international) ...read
  • torksoul (France, prefer ship Europe) (skipped by request)
  • Holandes (Spain) (skipped by request)
  • skeeterbess ...read
  • fuji (Syndey, Australia, ship international)...in transit
  • jebz (Melbourne, Australia, ship international)
  • junegirl (Wisconsin, ship international)


  • nillabreen (Massachusetts)


Journal Entry 3 by spaceystacey from Bridgeton, New Jersey USA on Saturday, January 3, 2004
Just received this bookring in the mail today from nillabreen. I am looking forward to reading this perhaps this weekend. Update. 1/25/04.... book was hard for me at first, am reading it now. Should be on its way in a week's time.

Journal Entry 4 by smiely from Gainesville, Florida USA on Monday, March 8, 2004
Part of a Book Crossing Book Ring!

Released on Monday, April 05, 2004 at through mail in Give to the followed bookcrosser on the bookring, Bookring Controlled Releases.

Sent to skeeterbess, next in the bookring!

Can't wait to hear what you think of this one!

Journal Entry 6 by skeeterbess from Waianae, Hawaii USA on Wednesday, May 5, 2004
Woo woo! What could be better? Home from a slogging day of work, I find a book from a friend waiting in the mailbox! I know that smiely & I discussed this in another forum, but I'm drawing a blank right now. That's okay ... I like surprises! I'm looking forward to getting acquainted with whomever/ whatever this one might be about!


Journal Entry 7 by skeeterbess from Waianae, Hawaii USA on Sunday, May 16, 2004
Can't say that I really liked this book. I note with interest that the previous readers did not review ... perhaps because they didn't think it was worth the effort?

The blurb on the flyleaf leads you to believe it's about a descent into mental illness, but that's a very small part of it. I think it's mainly about the author's obsession with finding paralles between his life and that of a possible ancestor who chose to wear a black veil. The writing style is irritating, with sentences that literally run to several pages & thoughts that don't seem to go anywhere. I think the writer was using this style as a device to illustrate his obsessive behavior, but it's annoying nonetheless. In talking about family stories he says: "If my great-grandfather was anything like my grandather, he undoubtedly embellished the narrative, as I in my turn may have embellished it, so that the truth of the story, again, has everything to do with the desperation of the tellers and their own symbolic inclinations." That was the feel that I got from the whole book ... that he wanted to tell his story as truth, but couldn't quite do it.

I'll be mailing to fuji in the next few days. Hope you like it a bit more than I did.

Journal Entry 8 by skeeterbess from Waianae, Hawaii USA on Wednesday, May 26, 2004
Mailed to fuji today. Sorry for the delay ... I've been too sick to go out just lately!

Journal Entry 9 by fuji from Sydney CBD, New South Wales Australia on Friday, March 3, 2006
Yes, over a year in the delivery, this book HAS arrived.
The package had a few misdirected/redirected stamps on it; looks as though it spent some time in the West Indies. Hmm.
Not really in the mood for Moody at the moment. It's up to jebz now...
f

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