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Moving the Hat (a construction term, meaning loosely "To get on with it") tells the story of writer and fine art photographer Richard Snodgrass in his journey to become an artist as he overcame the damaging psychological influence of his older brother, the poet W. D. Snodgrass, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1960 for Heart's Needle. Conceived to be published as a standard size book on uncoated paper to keep production costs reasonable, Moving the Hat uses both text and photographs to propel the narrative, each short prose section on one page in counterpoint with an attending image on the opposite page. The book begins with the author and his wife discussing how the memoir came about; the couple reappears periodically throughout the book discussing the goings on, the wife offering comments, amusing and otherwise, like a caustic Greek chorus. The author's journey itself begins when his brother's influence was the most prevalent and most damaging, in his late teens after the brother conducted a Freudian-inspired psychoanalytic intervention that turned the author against his family and led him to question everything on which he had so far based his life. After a series of colleges and universities, including a dalliance with Catholicism and a flirtation with becoming a monk, the author graduated from UC Berkeley in 1963. There followed several years in San Francisco with the hippie and peace movements at the blossoming folk-rock music scene; then a dozen years spent as a construction inspector of high-rise buildings; a marriage and divorce; eventually going on the road in his mid-thirties to return to the east and confront his feelings about his brother. The sexual misadventures that swirled within that confrontation scarred everyone involved. When his elderly mother was in trouble trying to maintain the family's 13-room house, the author returned to Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania and took up residence in the attic, bringing full circle the relationship with his mother before her death. Integral and intertwined with all this through the years was his never-ending efforts to become an artist in his own right. In time, in the familiar landscape of his youth, he finds his art and love and meaning.
