Daily Inspiration Quote by Rick Moody

Moody’s line throws a match at the polite fiction workshop where “relatable” still means sanitized. The catalog is the point: impotence beside bondage, fetishism beside bisexuality. By mixing what’s often framed as dysfunction (impotence) with what’s treated as deviance (bondage, fetishism) and what’s been historically policed as identity (bisexuality), he refuses the comforting hierarchy of “normal” sex with a few exotic footnotes. Everything goes in the same sentence, as ordinary as weather.

The specific intent is less to shock than to revoke an exemption. Literary fiction has long granted itself permission to depict violence, addiction, war, and despair in exquisite detail while treating many sexual realities as either pornographic, comic, or too “issue-driven” to be art. Moody is arguing for parity: if the novel claims to be a machine for representing human life, it can’t keep editing the bedroom to protect the reader’s self-image.

The subtext also targets craft. “Reflect” isn’t “celebrate.” He’s not lobbying for a sexy syllabus; he’s demanding psychological accuracy. Impotence is about vulnerability and power; fetishism and bondage are about desire, control, shame, and trust; bisexuality complicates the tidy narrative arcs fiction loves (the One Great Love, the final choosing). In context - post-90s American lit, post-AIDS cultural hangover, the culture wars’ obsession with sexuality - the statement reads like a defense of the novel’s jurisdiction: nothing human is outside its remit, including the parts we’d rather keep off the page.