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Pieces of Molly: An Ordinary Life

Author(s) : Judith Edwards

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Grapevine on 04/03/2015 17:25:34

(5 out of 5)

Grapevine writer and psychoanalyst Judith Edwards has written a beautiful book (a novel, a memoire) that begins in the womb and ends in Molly's grandmother's Christmas pudding (boiled for 12 hours, with ale and brandy to taste.

Molly strives to come to terms with her life, starting with the trauma of a difficult birth and an emotionally distant mother. As the book's preface says, quoting Montaigne, "We are all patchwork" and so our lives are not linear and progressive but rather complicated and patterned in difficult ways. It takes a lifetime to see the whole quilt.

Woven into the threads of this tale are the atmosphere, the geography, the physical space around Molly. This is a space situated in time, a time that is non-linear and reflexive. Molly grows up on a farm near perilous cliffs that drop off into the sea. Her father whom she idolizes raises farm animals and harvests wheat, but as years pass the world's increasing mechanization impacts his world. And Molly's.

There is so much to love in the book, so much self-discovery, as suggested by the enchanting cover image by Lille St. Claire O'Connor of a wide-eyed child immortalized in bronze.

I love the title Pieces of Molly – like pieces of eight. Spanish doubloons, coins that controlled the world in the 16th century. Coins from Bolivian mountains mined by slaves and natives at a tremendous cost in human life. Fragments of silver taken back to Europe from America.

Judith Edwards mines the past and brings forth a rich collection of memories, memories modified over time, roiled and reinterpreted as child grows into adulthood.