It was while speaking with Chris Jericho on Talk Is Jericho that Jon Moxley went into detail about his new autobiography, Mox, and just how he went about writing it. He also mentions that one of his colleagues wasn’t so thrilled that his own biography was one released by WWE or rather while he was with that company.
Of course this discussion on Talk Is Jericho occurred before the news the Moxley would be entering rehab earlier this week.
Moxley seemed to be intent on selling the book to the best of his ability, doing as much press before he would sequester himself in order to get well – he entering a rehab facility, which is extremely commendable.
On the fact that he had once been approached by WWE to do a book, he said:
“…Actually, they wanted me to write a book in WWE. They asked me to, like one of their WWE books, and I was like, ‘Ah, I don’t know, man. I’m not a former president or anything, man. Nobody needs to hear my story. I’m not that interesting,’ and they put a bunch of money on the table.
I was like, ‘Ah, maybe,’ so they talked to me with this ghostwriter guy. I didn’t know how the process worked. I was like, ‘I don’t have time to write a book. I’m on the road 300 days a year.’ So the guy talks to me, he’s like, ‘Yeah, basically, I’ll just ride around with you and follow you, and you just tell me stories and I’ll put them into words.’ And it made me so uncomfortable, and I was like, ‘I don’t know, man. If I was going to tell my story, I would tell it my way,’ but I kind of felt some pressure…”
via Talk Is Jericho /Wrestling Inc (Transcription)
He had asked Bryan Danielson at the time and Danielson gave him some sound advice, which ultimately made Moxley land on a decision for his own book with WWE:
“…I actually asked Bryan Danielson, who’d written a WWE book, which was good, I thought. And I was like, ‘Yo, if you could go back in time, would you do that book?’ And he said no instantly. He’s like, ‘It wasn’t exactly how I wanted it to be,’ and I was like, that’s all I needed to hear. That’s what my instinct was telling me, so I told them ‘no,’ and they’re like, ‘Really?’ … ‘it makes me feel really uncomfortable. I don’t want to do it, so I’m not doing it.’ …”
via Talk Is Jericho
So, all these years later, Mox is a book very much in the vein of Mick Foley’s first book…Mox written by Jon Moxley himself, where he had control of everything, as Mick did when Have a Nice Day: A Tale of Blood and Sweatsocks was released (interesting that that book was commissioned by WWE—makes you wonder just how different things are now than they once were in WWE and why that is, but perhaps that’s a story for another time). On the previous note in the first portion of this paragraph, Moxley said:
“…I found my own photographer; I wrote every single word of this myself. This is the least edited book of all time…”
via Talk Is Jericho
On his writing process, he said:
“…I wrote the whole thing on a Notes app on my wife’s MacBook, which I can’t operate at all…If I’m gonna be on a computer, I need to be on a ’90s computer with a mouse, like from computer lab. This MacBook, I literally couldn’t operate one function of this thing except the Notes app because I could just type it, and press the button, and send it on my email. So anytime something weird would pop up, I would have to be like, ‘Renee! I don’t know how to fix this!’ She would come down, fix it for me…”
via Talk Is Jericho
On if writing this all down, looking back on his time in the business so far, he pondered the fact that writing was almost like therapy with Jericho—the interview sounding very much like a therapy session of sorts, Moxley as honest as he always is, and so up-front with everything. Refreshing in an age when everything is so scripted and fake, dare I say it, in the media.
“There’s a definite catharsis to it…There’s some stuff you would have never thought about again, but then, when you go back and kind of explore it, you see it differently because now you’re a grown up. Some of the stuff you laugh at yourself, and you go, that’s hilarious that that’s what my mindset was at the time…or you understand somebody else’s perspective better where you go, oh, and it kind of makes it easier.
Then all sudden, you’re like, oh, I’ve been carrying around that baggage but I don’t need to. It’s stupid, but it kind of forces you to kind of introspect…”
via Talk Is Jericho
Introspection indeed. Mox proves with this book that he has the depth to take the reader on a journey worth reading, making his life, dare I say it, more interesting than some personalities that have released ghost-written biographies. This is a page-turner for sure, and the narrative found here is something that a ghostwriter following him around would never have been able to properly grasp.
Perhaps this is what Danielson felt about his own book and what Mox ultimately feared in releasing something like this (a pale comparison it would have ended up), with WWE. His has been an amazing journey thus far, as the book shows, and he has many more chapters to add it would seem, perhaps somewhere down that old road.
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