Thumbs way down, alas: arty, pretentious, and outstandingly dull. This is one of those books that focuses on tiny incidents in a very short time frame(in this case, a single day), incidents which in themselves seem minor, but which add up to serious emotional resonance. That's a tricky plan to pull off, and Madden doesn't come close. It's about a playwright who is trying to finish a play at the home of Molly Fox, a close friend and a fine actress. In the course of Molly Fox's birthday, the playwright (it's written in first person and I can't even remember her name now - that's how dull she is) is forced to come to terms with her failed romantic relationship with Andrew, their mutual friend.

I didn't care AT ALL about these people. I don't know who could. ( )

Excellent ( )

An unnamed playwright narrates the story over the period of one long day, summer solstice as it happens, June 21. It also happens to be her friend Molly's birthday. The writer is using Molly's home in England while Molly, a well known actress "with a velvet voice", takes a holiday in the playwright's home in New York. It's a story about knowing and not knowing the people we trust and call friends, lifelong friends. It's well done and shows how one small remark can throw sudden light on everything we know about someone and make things fall into place about their personalities, or quirks and preferences. We all come to realize in our lives that family members are often unknowable while we're young and even difficult to know well when we age and begin to lose them. Then we often have as family those we've chosen to be around us as friends. But Deirde Madden is here to shows us that the relationship we have with even close friends can be based on a few small bits of information only.

Molly hates her mother but is it really warranted? And she has a strong aversion to any reference to her own birthday, and it's not about her age, it's about something so deep she won't talk about it. We often accept our friends fears and eccentricities, often accommodating them without knowing what the cause is. After some years Molly does tell her friend the playwright why she feels that way but she allows no discussion of the subject, not even from her own brother, who feels quite differently. All the information we have about a friend is what they've told us. While they don't usually deceive us deliberately, they leave a lot out because well, it hurts. Things come out in bits over time. The question is obliquely raised too What do I really mean to this person? If I'm their best, longest, oldest etc. friend, why are there parts of themselves they haven't shared with me. For as our narrator says, they are always things we hold back.

Our playwright had planned to write all day and just when ideas start to form, she's had to deal with another person who's stopped by to ask about Molly. She meets people who she is surprised to find are part of Molly's life but not part of her own and she learns a few things about her friend. She has this lovely day of long summer light to sit and think too. An easy read and a quiet story but good and very thought-provoking. Four stars out of five. ( )

A subtle, thought-provoking exploration of life, love, friendship and family. The people and places were conjured so vividly that I felt as if I were actually there, listening to the narrator tell her story. Aspects of her tale were eerily reminiscent of my own experiences and resonated with me in a way I won’t forget for a while. Beautiful. ( )

I liked everything about this book: the object itself, a quality paperback with a hard-back style wrap-around jacket; the elegant appearance created by combination of the font and line-spacing; the way it grapples with profound issues about who we really are without becoming heavy or pretentious.

The narrator is a playwright. She has been a friend of the renowned stage actor Molly Fox since her university days. Now she is staying in Molly's Dublin home, while Molly herself visits New York. The book follows the author through a single day, midsummers day, which, she recalls, is also her friend's birthday. During the day, as the narrator struggles to get any work done, she dwells instead on her friendship with Molly, how they met, what they know and do not really know about each other, about their mutual friends and about their families.

Molly still carries emotional scars from her mother having left the family home on her seventh birthday, and feel's burdened by a brother with mental health problems. The narrator and an art historian called Andrew, are both haunted by their families and by their upbringing on opposite sides of Northern Ireland's sectarian divide. Indeed, these three main characters all seem to have spent their adult lives seeking to escape from their roots, only to realise how much those roots still mean to them.

Like Marilynne Robinson's "Gilead", this is a book about personal history and what it means, but whereas "Gilead" bored me and left me cold, I was completely enchanted by "Molly Fox's Birthday". ( )