Purple America: A Novel

Rick Moody

Nov 2015 · Open Road Media

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A son is tasked with an impossible decision in this poignant, astutely observed portrait of a family in crisis from the author of The Ice Storm

While visiting his mother, Billie, who suffers from a degenerative neurological disease that has left her paralyzed and unable to speak, Dexter “Hex” Raitliffe learns that his stepfather, Billie’s husband and caretaker, has left her. Alone and incapable of living on her own, Billie makes an unfathomable request of Hex: to assist her in committing suicide. Perpetually indecisive, paralyzed by self-doubt, and hindered by an unshakable stutter, Hex sets out to confront his stepfather, only to find himself facing off against his own struggles—with intimacy and alcoholism—along the way.
 
Back in the suburbs of his youth, Hex experiences the lull of nostalgia as well as the sting of painful memories like his father’s death as he tries to reconcile his mother’s fate and his own wavering identity. Author Rick Moody evokes this singular setting with stunning clarity. Profoundly tragic yet punctuated by moments of hilarity, Purple America is a searing gaze into one family’s fragile, chaotic heart.

This ebook features an illustrated biography of Rick Moody including rare images from the author’s personal collection.

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Rick Moody (b. 1961) is an award-winning novelist and short story writer. Born in New York City, he graduated from Brown University and earned a master of fine arts in creative writing from Columbia University. His first novel, Garden State, won the Pushcart Press Editors’ Book Award, and his memoir of his struggles with alcoholism and depression, The Black Veil, was awarded the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of Memoir. His 1994 bestseller, The Ice Storm, was adapted into a film starring Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver. Moody’s writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s Magazine, Details, and the New York Times. His work has also been selected for the Best American Stories, Best American Essays, and Pushcart Prize anthologies. His story “The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven” won the Paris Review’s Aga Khan Prize. Moody currently lives in Brooklyn and teaches creative writing at New York University.