On Home

Rick Moody: THE street addresses of my life, and there have been a great number of them, have often felt less like home to me than the places I’ve written about. The New Canaan, Conn., of 1973, when I was writing about it in the early ’90s. The Arizona of the near future, in a recent novel. I love landscapes of the imagination, less so the topographies of the so-called real world. And I suspect that’s the case with many writers of fiction.

Still, for me this entire question — the question of home — has shifted dramatically in the last year and a half for a simple and felicitous reason: the birth of my daughter, Hazel. My daughter has an entirely different conception of what home is. For her, at 18 months, home is just beginning to come into focus, and with it the features she will associate with that place: we live in a building with doormen (Carl, Rasim, Robert and Murat), and she knows all of them, and from our building we take a certain subway line (the No. 2, No. 3) to day care in downtown Manhattan. We get bagels at a cafe down the block. (“Bagel” was even one of my daughter’s first words.) We go to the farmers’ market by Grand Army Plaza on Saturdays. We order pizza nearby at a restaurant that she visited on the very first day after her birth.