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his entire seminarian career, beginning with his earliest, uncontrollable desire to enter the seminary because ofhis mortifying fear of girls and all things sexual, and his assessment that, as a result, “there was something deeply wrong” with him. The first several chapters revolve around Moody’s unrelenting emphasis on how troubled he was as a child, how disturbed he is as an adult, and how traumatizing the intervening years were. Further, and perhaps most important, he describes how difficult it is for him to recall these memories, both emotionally and physically: “Memory isn’t a resurrector of past reality so much as it is a storyteller.” His wife asks him (about the manuscript I’m reading) whether he’s writing memoir or fiction, and he responds that he’s “still thinking about it.”
    At this point, I believe that (1) I’m going to read the story of how Moody was molested by a priest at seminary, and (2) I’m going to have no way of knowing how much of what follows is “true.” As Moody’s story of adolescent angst unfolds, the feeling of impending molestation hovers—not on the page, but in my mind—over every encounter Moody has with a Father, every time he’s alone in a room with one. Whenever one of his classmates has a nervous breakdown or mysteriously decides to drop out and go home, I assume abuse is the root cause, but Moody doesn’t speculate. Where’s the trauma? The devastation? The “rotting pier” upon which the adult Moody’s family and marriage are to be just “barnacles”?
    I’m relieved, sort of, when Moody says that his seminary is shutting down. I realize that he isn’t going to bemolested there. The school closes, Moody goes home, and trauma is spared. To my dismay, I learn that Moody is going to transfer to another seminary—St. Anthony’s Franciscan, which proves to be far different from the previous one. Suddenly, the chapters are numbered in Roman numerals. I meet Father Mario, the consummate disciplinarian (he’s still alive; google him). Signs of sexual abuse abound, from kids being mysteriously summoned during class to audible screams coming from Mario’s office. And after several tortured months of enduring true Catholic discipline, Moody is kicked out for giving a homily about the hypocrisy of the institution of confession.
    Moody escapes unscathed. Finally, though, near the end of the book, Moody satiates my curiosity—really, my anxiety, my fascination. He reveals his dark secret, but it becomes immediately obvious that the event he describes is a fabrication. And Moody doesn’t disguise it: the very next passage begins, “Novelists get a free ride, presenting fact as fiction and taking undeserved credit for creativity when they’ve simply taken down what reality dictated to them. But let a nonfiction writer try to present fiction as fact for the noble cause of inspiring and uplifting the reader, and he ends up crucified on
Oprah
.” (Sing it, Fred!) The real source of Moody’s shame, I learn, is that the signs of abuse were all around him but he didn’t do anything about it. “This is what I can’t get over: the shame over my complicity in that series of monstrous crimes.”
    The book concludes with Moody’s revisiting St.Anthony’s with a friend, who shoots a photo of Moody comically trying to pry apart the bars of a gate. The concluding sentences: “We entitled it ‘Prisoner of Memory.’ Then we got the hell out of there.”
    Prisoner of memory. Moody’s book is what I had in mind when I wrote my harrumphing letter to the editor of
The New York Review of Books:
“
Pace
Lorrie Moore’s mention of my book
Reality Hunger
in her review of three memoirs,
Reality Hunger
is neither an ‘anti-novel jihad’ (Geoff Dyer’s jocular reference in his generous discussion of my book in
The Guardian
) nor a brief for the memoir. It is instead an argument for the poetic essay and the book-length essay—in particular, work that takes the potential