This image is the cover for the book Long Accomplishment

Long Accomplishment

“[A] moving, funny, hauntingly brilliant memoir about marriage.” —Caroline Leavitt, The San Francisco Chronicle

Rick Moody, the award-winning author of The Ice Storm, shares the harrowing true story of the first year of his second marriage in this eventful, month-by-month account

At this story’s start, Moody, a recovering alcoholic and sexual compulsive with a history of depression, is also the divorced father of a beloved little girl and a man in love; his answer to the question “Would you like to be in a committed relationship?” is, fully and for the first time in his life, “Yes.”

And so his second marriage begins as he emerges, humbly and with tender hopes, from the wreckage of his past, only to be battered by a stormy sea of external troubles—miscarriages, the deaths of friends, and robberies, just for starters. As Moody has put it, "this is a story in which a lot of bad luck is the daily fare of the protagonists, but in which they are also in love.” To Moody’s astonishment, matrimony turns out to be the site of strength in hard times, a vessel infinitely tougher and more durable than any boat these two participants would have traveled by alone. Love buoys the couple, lifting them above their hardships, and the reader is buoyed along with them.

Rick Moody

Rick Moody is the author of the award-winning memoir The Black Veil and of the novels Hotels of North America, The Four Fingers of Death, The Diviners, Purple America, The Ice Storm, and Garden State, as well as three collections of short fiction, including Demonology. Moody is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and of an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, as awarded by the French Republic. His work has been anthologized in Best American Stories, Best American Essays, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. He writes regularly about music at the Rumpus. He teaches at Brown University and lives with his family in Cranston, Rhode Island.

Henry Holt and Company