While still in his twenties, Rick Moody found that a decade of alcohol, drugs, and other indulgences had left him stranded in a depression so severe that he feared for his life. The road of excess led, for him, not to the palace of wisdom but rather to a psychiatric hospital in one of New York's least exalted boroughs.The Back Veil is Rick Moody's account of that debilitating passage in his life. It is the story of a mind unraveling, and of how it feels when the underpinnings of life fall away. The anxieties of early adulthood, of first finding a place in the world - the weight placed upon that first relationship, first job, first apartment - are presented here with enormous sympathy. Anyone who has ever felt his or her own psychological footing slip, even briefly, will find Moody's account of his breakdown and return both harrowing and heartbreaking. Read Less