Molly Fox's Birthday

Deirdre Madden had lurked under my radar until Remembering Light and Stone, but even then I was sceptical. It wandered aimlessly yet I was happy to be carried along by the strength of its sensual language and melancholic introspection. But surely this is just a one hit wonder! Luckily for me, this genre - one of my faves - seems to be exactly Madden's wheelhouse.

Over the course of a day, we're taken through years of relationships and history as the protagonist reveals her memories like a colour linocut. True feelings are hinted at just beneath the surface. There are lots of thinking and monologues but it never stagnates. There are some of my favourite archetype characters like the Illusive Successful Chameleon Friend and the Academic show more Aesthete, and the semi/less-successful Outsider who forms an unlikely relationship with them and catalogues it all. In a lesser writer, I would've rolled my eyes, but Madden elevates it all.

Even now as Madden subtly establishes herself as one of my potential faves, I struggle to pinpoint her elusive mastery. But mastery it really is, and I'll have to start expanding my Madden collection. show less

A woman stays in the house of an old friend while that old friend is away. A day passes. She thinks back over the two decades of her relationship with that friend, Molly Fox, and another friend who was at university with both of them. Not much to build a story on, you might think, but this was tremendous - an engaging story of the dynamics within friendships but also an examination of what humans are. Where does the self come from? Is it made of memories, of the things that we gather around us, do we create it from will power? The narrator is a playwright, Molly an actor, Andrew (the third friend) someone who has transformed himself from his poor Belfast origins into a poised and mellifluous television art historian; so another theme is show more realness, authenticity and artifice, and what this means in terms of the self. Even though we create our selves, is our self still real? Do we choose what to remember and what to forget?

I couldn't put this book down. Possibly the best read of the year so far. (I'm reasonably sure it was an LT recommendation a couple of years ago, thank you to whoever it was that reviewed it so positively then).

One of the strange things about really old friendships is that the past is both important and not important. Taking the quality of the thing as a given - the affection, the trust - the fact that I had known both Molly and Andrew for over twenty years gave my relationships with them more weight and significance than friendships of, say, three of four years' standing. And yet we rarely spoke to each other of the past, of our lives and experiences during that long period of time. To do so would have been in many instances mortifying. Andrew once said to me, "You have the most extraordinary memory," to which I replied, "I'm very good at forgetting things too," and he responded, without missing a beat, "I'm glad to hear it." show less

In Molly Fox's Birthday, the nameless narrator, a mostly successful playwright, is spending some time in the borrowed house of her friend, the famous stage actress Molly Fox, while she attempts to get a start on writing her next play. Readers spend one day in the company of the playwright while she rattles around Molly's house casting about for inspiration for her new play and lost in her own thoughts of the past as she contemplates her relationships with Molly and an old college friend turned famed television art historian, Andrew Fforde. The day in question, of course, is Molly's birthday, which also happens to be the longest day of the year, the Summer Solstice. Obviously, there's not much action, most of which involves the narrator show more buying food, preparing food, and eating food while she contemplates her friends and the past during the heat of a beautiful summer day.

That night she was communicating something of her deepest self in a way that is only possible for her when she is on stage. Is the self really such a fluid thing, something we invent as we go along, almost as a social reflex? Perhaps it is instead the truest thing about us, and it is the revelation of it that is the problem; that so much social interchange is inherently false, and real communication can only be achieved in ways that seem strange and artificial.

Despite the lack of action, I was utterly taken in by the playwright's memories and musings. The narration seems tangential with the playwright first considering Molly and her ability to manifest a character in a play with her whole self then wandering to the playwright's past with Andrew whose serious studiousness she discovered late nights in the library at Trinity, and then her thoughts drift, as thoughts might, to a dinner she and Molly shared with the playwright's brother Tom, the priest, all told in a voice that is smart but never pretentious. On it goes as thoughts do, meandering from one experience to the next until you find that you've been enveloped in a serious and unexpectedly focused contemplation of how identity is shaped by oneself, one's experience, and one's family and how truth and reality are often more accessible and tolerable in the fiction and artifice of plays (or books, I'm betting) than in the humdrum routines and conversations of our day to day lives. Soon you'll realize you've been caught up in the story of an author who has an unusually keen perception of the bits and pieces of character that make up a person and an uncanny knack for putting them to the page and creating a focused theme that is compelling without being too serious or, dare we say, scholarly.

"We were talking about her work and she said that there's a kind of truth that can only be expressed through artifice. She said that what she wanted to convey to people through her work, more than anything else, was reality. It was a question of showing something familiar but in a moment outside time; saying, 'Here's love, here's sorrow. Do you recognise them?' I thought it was a good way of putting it."

I won't say I wasn't occasionally aware that the course of the narrator's reflection was subtly manipulating me toward the truths Madden was trying to illuminate with her story, but on the whole the playwright's meandering thoughts flowed in a surprisingly natural way with brief interruptions for the minutia of a day spent alone with the occasional happening that served as a natural redirect. So taken in was I by the playwright's friends as magnified by her thoughts and the very true insights she seemed to easily arrive at through the course of the day that I hardly wanted it to end. In Molly Fox's Birthday, Deirdre Madden manages to accomplish the rare feat of both telling us and showing us just how great a deal of truth there is to be found in fiction. Highly recommended! show less

An unnamed narrator (whom I thought of as Deirdre when I wanted a name), is staying in her friend Molly's house while Molly is traveling. Deirdre is a playwright and Molly is one of the finer stage actors of her time; they experienced early success together, with Molly acting in Deirdre's first hit play. Today, the longest day of the year, is Molly's birthday, and Deirdre, experiencing a block as she attempts to start a new play, instead spends most of the day contemplating the history of her relationships with Molly and others.

This sounds as if it vcould be dull navel-gazing, but it is anything but that. Madden uses Deirdre's reflections to present subtly changing pictures of Molly, Andrew, other characters, and of the narrator show more herself. In doing so, she invites us to reflect on how we see ourselves and present ourselves to others. We are given numerous glimpses of Molly and her family and subtly invited to reassess the honesty of her depiction of her life. As an actor, Molly is easy to suspect of artifice; we must remember that as a playwright, the narrator is equally in the business of trying to present truth (or something else) through artifice. I found Molly Fox's birthday a very entertaining and interesting day. show less

In this quiet, contemplative book, an unnamed narrator spends a day reminiscing about her long-time friend, Molly Fox.

"Molly Fox is an actor, and is generally regarded as one of the finest of her generation. (She insists upon 'actor': If I wrote poems would you call me a poetess?) One of the finest but not, perhaps, one of the best known. ... She likes the fear, the danger even, of the stage, and it is for the theatre that she has done her best work. Although she often appears in contemporary drama her main interest is in the classical repertoire, and her greatest love is Shakespeare." (p. 2)

The narrator is a playwright, using Molly's house as a retreat to work on her latest play while Molly is away in New York and London. During the show more course of a day -- which happens to be Molly's birthday -- she relives significant moments in their lives, and reflects on their relationships with friends and siblings.

The two met many years before, when Molly was cast in the narrator's play, and supported each other through the highs and lows in their careers and relationships. The narrator's older brother, Tom, is a priest who befriended Molly and may have counseled her through some difficult situations. Molly's brother, Fergus, suffers from undefined psychological difficulties precipitated by traumatic events in his childhood.

As the narrator putters around Molly's house, she recounts several events in her relationship with Molly, painting a clear picture but one that seems just a bit too cut and dry. I suspected there was more to the story than she was letting on, perhaps more than she was willing to admit to herself. I began to pick up on tiny clues to a deeper perspective. When Fergus drops in to visit Molly but finds only the narrator at home, he stays to chat and ultimately provides critical insight to Molly's character and history, casting entirely new light on everything that was revealed before.

This was a very interesting study of memory and point of view, and how personal experience shapes relationships. show less

Again, lindsacl has written such a succinct review that I won't bother but will just slip in a few thoughts and comments.
I didn't realize how much I loved this little book nor how well written and important it was until I finished it and sat there without a word to say. Because what does one say when they have read perfection? And it is not the story although it is a good story. It is not the characters although I related to the them all from the beginning. It was simply the writing. This author writes exquisitely and with such subtlety that one is not even aware of it until it is done. At least this reader was not. Deirdre Madden.............an author of contemporary literature to be reckoned with.

A particularly poignant journey through one woman's thought-world. As an artist and playwright the unnamed narrator takes us through the longest day of the year, June 21st - which also happens to be the birthday of her long-time friend Molly Fox, explaining the title. It is a lovely contemplative story that brings insight into how eventful an uneventful day can really be. "Molly Fox's Birthday" is a keen analysis of how the seemingly mundane can trigger deeply moving and impactful moments in one person's life. From her thoughts in the early morning hours to contemplating how to deal with her own troubled romantic relationships the story is like one of the bees making it's way from flower to flower in Molly Fox's front garden. It is show more beautifully written in a strong Irish tradition reminicent of Oscar Wilde or James Joyce. It is a wholly feminine narrative that proves itself worthy of the multiple literary accolades. While charming and intriguing it is a story that brings to light the hidden life that plays out in everyone's mind through their thoughts however scattered they may first appear to be. A wonderful study in mindfulness!

I am very grateful for having been awarded this book through a GoodReads GiveAway! show less