'I met Mollie's paintings before I met Mollie' Shortly after the imposed isolation of the pandemic, Sara Baume came across a painting at a pop-up exhibition in a renovated shed in rural West Cork. It so intrigued her that she was inspired to make contact with the artist. Mollie Douthit, a North Dakotan exile, was living and working alone in a log cabin down a ravaged laneway surrounded by rugged coastline. Sara and Mollie discovered they had much in common - a dysfunctional attitude towards companionship, a devotion to the daily rituals of their respective art practices, an affinity with nature. They started to meet every month for soup and punishing swims in the Atlantic. Sara fell under the spell of Mollie's paintings, pictures that welded memory and reality, and gradually started to write about them, curious as to whether any particular insight might be provided by the intimacy of friendship with the artist, and whether it might be possible to craft a book in the style of the paintings. But what she had not anticipated was that a settled period in her own life would coincide with a period of tumultuous change for Mollie, and soon she found herself squabbling with more complex ideas, about community and nationality, about neurosis and mysticism, about love and pain and the power of art.
Sara Baume is a writer's writer, able to clothe her insights on life, art and human connection in beautifully evocative language. There are few living writers who can artistically convey compassion in a single sentence. Sara has given us all the gift of friendship with this book, but most importantly, has allowed us the privilege of getting to know Mollie through the creative lens of an unreliable memory
Derek Owusu
It was a wrench to let go of this beautiful book. Sara Baum has written - through a friendship that is both fully lived and dutifully examined - about place, art and the strange absolutes that lie in the corners of a creative life. Unforgettable, full of love and the life-affirming joy of having a friend
Ben Pester
Opening Night is a wonderful study of creativity and collaboration, ritual and repetition, and the power of art to connect us. But most of all, it shows just how a friendship can emerge reluctantly - but, crucially, organically - between two artists who each revel in their own reclusiveness. It hit me on many different levels
Benjamin Myers
A wonderful writer
Max Porter
Baume is a writer of outstanding grace and style. She writes beyond the time we live in
Colum McCann
