A successful second shot at love
Memoir explores an impressive relationship, neither idealized nor idyllic, but mature
F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, “There are no second acts in American lives.”
This sentiment is fundamentally untrue, as anyone who has passed through adivorce and into a second marriage will tell you.
This does not mean, however, that the second act is necessarily easy, as renowned American writer Rick Moody makes clear in his new book, The Long Accomplishment: A Memoir of Hope and Struggle in Matrimony.
The book begins with a sense of hope and contrition. “In order to have a second marriage you can believe in,” Moody writes, “you may have to fail at your first marriage. I failed spectacularly at mine.”
A brief summary of his failings follows, culminating in Moody meeting Laurel, a photographer, at a reading at an ashram. Their relationship builds slowly, platonically, an unusual process for Moody, whose previous memoir, The Black Veil, documented, among other things, “a spree of self-centredness, moral fuzziness, and destructive sexual abandon.”
Moody and Laurel marry in October 2013, and the book follows their marriage from the eve of the wedding through the next 12 months. It is a chronicle of death and loss, the financial difficulties of living as artists juxtaposed against the gentrification of their Park Slope neighbourhood (and the invasion of truly terrible — nay, outright toxic — neighbours), struggles with infertility and the American medical industrial complex, and the violation of their homes, at varying levels. There’s also an intense, protracted piece of performance art (which reads as life-changing as it probably was) and a possibly cursed postcard, signed by Charles Manson. It has the texture of a nightmare, one which would be difficult for any couple to weather.
The events are rendered in Moody’s signature style: long, complex sentences, rooted in ideas and philosophy, wending their way across the page. The style, however, creates a distance which readers might initially find off-putting: Moody feels detached from the events of his own life, analytical, rather than emotional.
It becomes clear, soon enough, that this approach is the book’s great strength: the analytic distance is necessary to keep the events of that year from overwhelming the reader. The final pages are very nearly overwhelming, even with that distance; without it, the book would be unbearable.
At the core of The Long Accomplishment is an exploration of an impressive relationship, neither idealized nor idyllic, but a mature, mutually-supportive partnership.
Moody and Laurel work together well (in every sense of the word). Their respective arts cross-pollinate one another, and their respective strengths serve as empathic support for each other and for their relationship as a whole. It’s a relationship to be envied, especially in light of the hell they walked through together.