Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

for you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today my guest is Rick Moody, the author most recently of The Black Vail, a memoir with

digressions published by Little Brown. He's the author as well of several novels, Garden State,

The Ice Storm, Purple America, and several collections of short stories, The Ring of Brightest Angels

around heaven and demonology. The new book, The Black Vail, seems to be the answer to an implicit promise made in the last

words of his first book of short stories. He says, there was a time when I was an adolescent,

when I didn't feel like I had a dad,

even though he didn't live that far away,

and I saw him on Sundays.

This is an admission that won't please him or the rest of my family.

The new book, The Black Vail, begins virtually immediately after a short preface with the announcement that this is a book about paternity, about patrimony, about the things inherited from the father, and that the mother will not be much of a presence in this book. What enabled you to begin to write about fatherhood?

I suspect in a way what was happening was that I stopped worrying about my actual dad

and that by thinking about patrimony in more emblematic ways,

I was able to talk more about my dad if you see the paradox.

In other words, for a while I've been really hung up, especially in Garden State and the Ice Storm, with feeling my way through my relationship with this actual person that I grew up with.

And maybe the passage you're quoting from primary sources was the period on that sentence, that particular

sort of attempt to deal with the specific person. But I grew out of it sort of, and I began to feel

...