Ask a Sober Oldster #25: Rick Moody
"When I was active, any stiff breeze, any mild bit of reversal, was enough to send me down into the narcissistic ball of pain. Now, mostly, I am just exceedingly glad still to be here."
This monthly interview series is a collaboration between Oldster Magazine and The Small Bow, A.J. Daulerio’s excellent newsletter about recovery and mental health, and will appear in both newsletters. Learn more about this collaboration in this Oldster podcast/videocast episode.
Rick Moody was born in New York City; raised in Connecticut, educated in New England; author of some books; professor of the practice at Tufts University; columnist on musical subjects at SALMAGUNDI magazine; living in Boston, MA.
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How old are you, and how long have you been in recovery?
I’m 63 years old and I just celebrated 38 years in recovery.
How did you get there?
I used a lot of drugs and alcohol, always in a substance-abuser kind of way, from my early teens onward. I started to have some pretty serious and distracting mental health problems in my early 20s, including acute depression, and that was the immediate catalyst for recovery. I was in a dual diagnosis program at a psychiatric hospital in 1987 and that jumpstarted the process.
What are the best things about being in recovery?
Right now, I would say that I am in a patch where I am very grateful for being a sober and abstinent person. There is no struggle about the relevance of this gratitude. I am ever mindful of how lucky I am. Recovery seems very much about the “joy of living,” as it says in our literature. I feel joyful.
The combination of being a creative person and being long-term on the road of sobriety is completely satisfying. My basic premise is sort of: “What am I going to make today?” And one of the things I try to make is: smoothly functioning human relationships where I am of service. I want to have lightened the load for the other humans (like for my wife and the other members of my family, and everyone else too), and I try to do it without compromising too much on anonymity.
I am much, much calmer, I suspect. I am very comfortable with who I am. There’s nothing in life that I think I must have that I did not in some way accomplish. There’s no part of me that I wish were otherwise. Almost all of the replacement addictions have passed out of my orbit (though I am still working on sugar!). I think it took me quite a long time in sobriety to get here to where I am now. I was very, very stubborn. But, even if you are stubborn, if you stay sober, you eventually come tantalizingly close to all those promises the sober people speak of.
What’s hard about being in recovery?
At various points, it has been remarkably hard. For example, my sister died when I was about eight years clean and that overturned the apple cart completely. There was, then, a long journey through grief. And, accordingly, I had to retool my spiritual thinking such that “horrible bad news and loss” could be part of the journey, no matter how sober I was. And, later, I lost jobs in sobriety, I got divorced, I lost a friendship here and there. It’s life, and if you live long enough, all the things that happen in a life will come to pass. Recovery gives us the tools for this, thank goodness.
When I was active, any stiff breeze, any mild bit of reversal, was enough to send me down into the narcissistic ball of pain. Now, mostly, I am just exceedingly glad still to be here.
How has your character changed? What's better about you?
I just had a conversation about this with a pal who has about my same amount of time, and we concluded that it’s awfully difficult to pinpoint, in oneself, the change! But it’s conversely easy to recognize it in the people around you. My friend has become so wise, so gentle, so reflective. And he was above all a brilliant, fast-talking, professionally ambitious guy back in the early part of sobriety. In our conversation, he was able to tell me that similar changes are true in my case.
I am much, much calmer, I suspect. I am very comfortable with who I am. There’s nothing in life that I think I must have that I did not in some way accomplish. There’s no part of me that I wish were otherwise. Almost all of the replacement addictions have passed out of my orbit (though I am still working on sugar!). I think it took me quite a long time in sobriety to get here to where I am now. I was very, very stubborn. But, even if you are stubborn, if you stay sober, you eventually come tantalizingly close to all those promises the sober people speak of.
Oh, and by the way, another friend, when I spoke to him of attempting to answer this slippery question about change said that, these days, when I smile (my friend said this of me), I smile with my whole face.
What do you still need to work on? What “character defects” do you still wrestle with?
I think I still have a pronounced tendency to project negatively onto silence. When I don’t get a response, I tend to think I must have done something awful—maybe because I did so many awful things when I was younger. And I still am really not a person who reacts well to anything I perceive as a direct order. My response, in the professional space (and it has not been good for my advancement!), to a direct order, is I want to walk out of the room. I think I have gotten better at these situations—I can recognize when they are taking place or when they are upcoming—but I have not completely eradicated my counterproductive responses.
However, I have given it a lot of thought, and it is my considered opinion that God builds in the little bits of failure, designs them in, according to something like the Japanese concept of wabisabi. To “fail,” to be “imperfect,” is, in this way of thinking, to be made in God’s image. Failure is a blessing for us. It’s poignant, it is the express train to humility, which as you know is from the Latin for “of the ground.”
At various points, it has been remarkably hard. For example, my sister died when I was about eight years clean and that overturned the apple cart completely. There was, then, a long journey through grief. And, accordingly, I had to retool my spiritual thinking such that “horrible bad news and loss” could be part of the journey, no matter how sober I was. And, later, I lost jobs in sobriety, I got divorced, I lost a friendship here and there. It’s life, and if you live long enough, all the things that happen in a life will come to pass. Recovery gives us the tools for this, thank goodness.
What’s the best recovery memoir you’ve ever read? Tell us what you liked about it.
Hmm. I confess I don’t read that many of them! Living it is enough! But I am going to go out on a limb and declare John Cheever’s Journals a de facto recovery memoir. It is shaped like one, in terms of trajectory, and it is probably his late-life sobriety that permitted him to think of his journals as being publishable and having a redemptive shape. The Journals of John Cheever is also one of the most gorgeously written collections of diaristic writings anywhere.
And it happens, and I’m going to say this only because some of the people involved are no longer living, that Cheever was my grandsponsor in recovery, in that for a while he was my very first sponsor’s sponsor. I got second-generation sober advice from John Cheever! And I got a tremendous amount, in early sobriety, from reading and thinking about all of his work. And I still do get a tremendous amount out of reading him and thinking about him. Also: if you read Susan Cheever’s excellent memoir Home Before Dark, in the context of the Cheever journals, you learn even more.
What are some memorable sober moments?
Somehow I have gotten this far without mentioning my two children, whom I devoutly love! I will be honest and say I was very nervous about becoming a father in sobriety, didn’t think I would be good at it, didn’t think I was smart enough, and so on, but then I passed through that phase and I was able to be present for the birth of both my daughter (who is now 16) and my son (who is 9), and in both cases these events were astounding opportunities to be here, sober, aware, bearing witness.
Both of my children are deep, wise, emotionally sophisticated people, all of the things I wasn’t when I was young, and I suspect this is in part because I got to be in their lives sober, doing some dance of humility and acceptance for them to see. I hope I can continue to give them the gift of actually showing up for life’s journey. They make me a better person.
It happens, and I’m going to say this only because some of the people involved are no longer living, that Cheever was my grandsponsor in recovery, in that for a while he was my very first sponsor’s sponsor. I got second-generation sober advice from John Cheever! And I got a tremendous amount, in early sobriety, from reading and thinking about all of his work. And I still do get a tremendous amount out of reading him and thinking about him. Also: if you read Susan Cheever’s excellent memoir Home Before Dark, in the context of the Cheever journals, you learn even more.
Are you in therapy? On meds? Tell us about that.
I am not either of these things, not in therapy, nor on meds. I was in therapy for a long, long time, 25 years or so. But then owing to the combination of 25 years in therapy and a similar amount of recovery time I sort of felt like I had graduated from the office visits.
The major Rick Moody problems are well known to me, at this point, as are the best solutions to these problems. Twice in sobriety I briefly took medication—right at the beginning, and then once in middle sobriety when I was stuck for a bit. I am in no way against medication, but I also think that for me the greatest value is in talk therapy and sharing in the recovery community.
What sort of activities or groups do you participate in to help your recovery? (i.e. swimming, 12-step, meditation, et cetera)
I do lots of these things. I pray. I believe strongly in the “walking meditation.” And I have been known to go to church too. I go to church without one hundred percent adherence to any particular sect of, e.g., Christianity, but simply because the habit of reverence seems very important to me. Reverence and the tradition of reverence, these are good.
Are there any questions we haven’t asked you that you think we should add to this? And would you like to answer it?
Q: What spiritual literature are you reading right now?
A: For two years now I have been trying to learn Japanese (which, as befits Japan itself, is both quite easy and nearly impossibly difficult), and one of my express interests in this regard has been to read Basho, the great master of the haiku, in the original. I can sort of read a tiny bit of him in Japanese. But my experience of the haiku is that this work tells me over and over again how not to be in my head, how, instead, to be here, alert, awake, alive, open to the impressions of nature and the real. This is exactly relevant to my experience of being sober.
An excellent question for anyone to ask every day!
>>My basic premise is sort of: “What am I going to make today?”<<
Truly beautiful, Rick! "Failure is a blessing for us. It’s poignant, it is the express train to humility, which as you know is from the Latin for “of the ground.” I, for one, didn't know "humility came from Lating "of the ground." WOW. Yes! Also "Wabisabi" -Love!