Molly begins not with a plan but an unrecognizable inkling. She loves to read. Everything. Mostly, she reads what is around the house from Reader’s Digest to John Jakes to Little Women.
And Molly loves English class. But, she thinks, everybody—every girl—loves English. But not everybody—not every girl—is good at the harder subjects like math or chemistry. Molly does not want to be like everybody else, especially like every other girl. And so chemistry it is. At least for her first semester of college. Then, she changes to biology, then to biochemistry, then back to chemistry, each time loudly declaring the move a fundamental and final change that will surely lead to the med school her parents so desire. Meanwhile, she continues to quietly and passionately read Bronte, Blake and Keats.
Mostly though, thanks no doubt to her Catholic upbringing, Molly wants to be a saint. As part of that project, she volunteers to tutor at the elementary school on the side of town furthest from Juniper State. The walk to what is considered to be a “not so nice” area impresses Molly’s roommate, who calls it “a daring move.”
Note that it’s easier for Molly to imagine being a saint than being a writer or, as she calls it, “an author.” She can picture herself inside the stereotypically racist tropes behind all those Peace Corps and Save the Children commercials of her childhood, but she can’t imagine going on and on for pages and pages. Anyone who can do that must be a genius. Me, she thinks, I have difficulty keeping up with the diary my mother gave me for Christmas, managing only a paragraph here or there, despite multiple resolutions to write in it every day.
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Balancing sainthood with a science load proves more difficult than Molly had imagined. Only insomnia and sheer grit propel her to a biology degree. This milestone induces panic, prompting a move to New York City to live with her best friend. Luck is with her and, after two months, she finds work as a lab tech. It’s even in a university lab that does cancer research. She tells her parents that the experience will help her get into medical school, though she’s not sure she believes what she’s saying anymore.
There are boys, too, and then a particular boy, a red-headed philosopher, who surprises her with his kindness. Unfortunately, in a final surprise that has little to do with kindness, he sleeps with her best friend.
When dealing with a heartbreak and being a saint and a scientist becomes overwhelming, Molly has a breakdown. It’s difficult to get out of bed in the morning and go to work and so she calls in and calls in and calls in until they call her out.
Molly can’t believe it. “I was fired,” she says out loud, trying to comprehend the situation. Me, Molly Walsh, class salutatorian, girl voted most likely to succeed. Fired.
Out of work, Molly spends a lot of time in bed reading Karl Marx (a gift from the philosopher) supplemented by Edith Wharton and Margaret Atwood novels tha finally tell the truth about romantic relationships: they doom women to suicide or madness.
Molly devotes a lot of time to transferring balances among credit cards. She flirts with the idea of becoming a philosophy professor, a fringe but still acceptable practical career choice that has the added advantage of sticking a finger in the eye of the red-headed philosopher.
Then, it happens.
The muse visits her—on a New Jersey Transit Bus no less. Words with a rhythm pop into her head. Names of characters compel her. She begins to write a story. She wonders, could I really write a book? Maybe I don’t have to be a genius.Maybe I just have to have a lot to say. And now she does have a lot to say: about boys who are not yet men, about being a girl-woman who wants to grow up, and about the screwed-up world that regularly screws people and screws them up.
Why not? This becomes Molly’s mantra as she waits for the muse to visit again.
She takes the first of many writing classes.
“You have a lot of great material,” says her teacher, a woman with large green eyes that pop out when she speaks. “But you have to learn craft.”
Molly has no idea what she means.
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A year later after several six-week, “So you Want to Write A Novel?” classes and part-time work at a dentist’s office where she reprimands people for missing their appointments, Molly decides to get an MFA. It’s only two years and if it doesn’t pan out, she can do something else.
“You want to be famous?” her mother scoffs. Her father walks out of the room, just wanders away, after Molly explains that she has begun writing a novel and that she is going to go to school to study fiction writing.
At family parties after that, Molly mentions her dream occasionally and hears the silence descend. Or she listens to one of the other younger cousins say, “You’re writing a novel?!” Each time, it’s as if Molly has announced that she can do backflips while simultaneously sewing a button on a shirt.
The cousins are accountants, real estate agents, and nurses who enjoy their food and their football. All solidly married with two or three kids. Family scandal is as rare as a winning lottery ticket, since no one even plays the numbers.
Molly’s parents are not artists. They are practical people: they never ever go to a car wash; they rarely eat out and never pay full price; they spend nearly every Sunday afternoon cutting out coupons and filing them; if they had a motto it would be: responsible, thrifty people who act in sensible and practical ways always succeed.
Throughout her childhood, Molly’s parents told her to do what she loved, even if they seemed sure that she would love to do something practical: be a doctor or—in a pinch—a lawyer or engineer. Part of the advice stuck. Molly wants to do what she loves: scribble on the wide-open page.
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Arriving at grad school, Molly feels ready to write and write and write.
At the bar after the first workshop, the dashing professor tells her that he only wrote and didn’t work for fourteen years. Molly admires him, seeing him as an authentic rebel who is living a true life unchained to the crass demands of the economic system.
She misses the fact that he is heir to a tobacco fortune and that he always has a working woman on his arm to help with the bills.
Molly hears of another writer who lived in an abandoned building while he wrote.
Sooooo cool, she thinks.
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Molly’s parents do not believe in giving her money to help her pursue what they consider to be “nonsense.” Instead, they often say, “It’s not too late to go to law school.”
So Molly takes out student loans, lots of loans, and economizes. She shops at Goodwill. It’s cheap and gives her an eco-chic image, too. She doesn’t go to malls and only occasionally visits the dollar store. She does not understand why people keep pressing their old clothes on her.
She learns to cook. She reads about an artist who buys a $3.50 plate of rice and beans and makes it last for two days and feels pride that she cooks $2 worth of beans and rice and makes it last for five days. She goes only to free concerts in the park and learns to appreciate Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Cheryl Wheeler and the Bobs.
The dashing professor is encouraging, and so are some classmates. And this is all Molly needs to keep writing while figuring out how to pay the light bill by donating her eggs.
The next year a new graduate student asks where the good restaurants in town are. Molly tells him she has no idea, as she has never been to one. She barely registers his shock and surprise and wonders at his question: How can he afford a restaurant on our stipend?
At a free talk by Elizabeth Martin, a writer Molly idolizes, she listens to Martin explain that in “the bad old days” she washed dishes in a bathtub. These words provide proof, Molly thinks, that real writers must struggle to succeed. She doesn’t think about the fact that Elizabeth Martin had a two-book deal at the ripe-old age of twenty-four and that she, Molly, is already thirty-two.
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Molly becomes very familiar with housing law. Landlords must provide heat from October to May. From the hours of seven a.m to eleven p.m., apartments must be sixty-eight degrees. They may drop to fifty-five degrees between the hours of eleven p.m. and seven a.m.
Molly wonders how long it takes to raise the temperature from fifty-five degrees to sixty-eight degrees in a three-hundred-and-fifty-square-foot apartment. With her hand on the cold radiator, she realizes she may never know.
“Do you think I’m God?” the landlord asks when she complains.
Shivering, Molly calls home for comfort. Her father answers. Molly explains the landlord’s comments, discusses steps to bring in the authorities, possible legal action.
“Watch yourself,” her father says. “You’re going to get yourself thrown out of there.”
These words take Molly’s breath away.
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Molly believes that all this scrimping and saving and sacrificing is teaching her something about the human condition. She only wishes she could figure out what that something is.
“I don’t want a job,” she yells at her mother as grad school stretches into its fourth year, the MFA morphing into a PhD, and Molly reaches her mid-thirties. She feels indignant that her mother would suggest such a thing.
Crafting stories, she has written with a conviction she has previously never known is akin to creating miniature haunted houses: the pounding of nails is important, as is the building of oddly shaped rooms connected by passageways that twist and turn and sometimes lead nowhere, enabling the spirits of the dead to dwell within. She can’t bear the idea of leaving it all for some job!
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Molly feels irritated when visiting writers proclaim that they didn’t think their writing would take them anywhere. Aren’t they supposed to have good imaginations? she thinks.
She can certainly picture how it will be to be a writer, a real writer, a published writer. People will hang on her every word, but she will be modest and funny, of course. She will point out that before she was published, no one paid any mind to her. It doesn’t occur to Molly that there might be a reason no one pays any mind to her.
Molly sees herself giving the usual spiel about how she felt different from everyone else, like she didn’t fit in. This will be very true in her case, she thinks, as she’s finding it hard to make friends. The writers at her PhD program don’t seem to get along. When they go out for a drink after class, no one seems to have anything to say.
When her classmates do talk, they bond over their dislike of the “memoirish impulse” and what they call the “oppression of plot.” Molly tries to see what they mean, but she can’t help but love a good yarn with characters whose hearts tug and break.
In an effort to connect, Molly tries a different tack, deciding to share tips on getting by with so little funds. She talks about the bargain frozen fish (twelve fillets for $5!) she buys and wonders why her classmates stare and stare and stare at her.
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Loss of water is grounds for condemning a building, Molly learns over December break in her fifth year of graduate school.
When the housing inspector comes shortly before Christmas, Molly has to ask him to repeat himself three times when he says, “What programs are you on?”
Downstairs, the landlord begs the inspector for more time to get the water up and running.
“You would throw a man and his family out of their home three days before Christmas?” he asks again and again.
That afternoon the landlord begins digging a hole in the backyard. All through the evening, the dirt piles up. The next day Molly has water, except in the kitchen sink.
Around ten the next morning, the landlord corners Molly on the stairs.
“Did you let the housing inspector in?”
“What?” Molly says, in her most innocent voice.
“Did you let the housing inspector in?”
“Who?” Molly says.
Home for the holidays, Molly learns that her parents are helping her soon-to-be married younger sister with the down payment on a house.
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Molly dates occasionally. She’s embarrassed to bring men back to her bedroom with its futon mattress on the floor, its table rescued from the trash, its desk a piece of plywood over two mismatched filing cabinets. Charming when she was twenty-five, but she’s not so sure it looks so great at thirty-six without even one published story to show for it.
The next Christmas, Molly’s the maid of honor at her younger sister’s wedding. Material goods aren’t important, she tells herself for the millionth time as she covets the blender, the silk sheets, and the crystal water glasses her sister receives.
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As she writes the ending of her novel, Molly reads about a famous writer who wrote her book by traveling from writers’ colony to writers’ colony. All expenses paid. That’s exactly what I need, she thinks, and embarks on a similar journey. When her motto for the trip becomes “yet another thing I can’t afford,” she realizes the famous writer never explained how she got the cash for gas, toiletries, and a whole host of other expenses not covered by the colonies.
After finally finishing the novel, Molly sends it out to agents, to more agents, and then more agents. It’s part of the process, everyone tells her. After sixty rejections, Molly decides to try to publish her short stories before sending out her novel again. Two years later, with a pile of rejection slips she couldn’t even count if she wanted to, Molly feels dismayed, depressed. No one likes my stuff, she thinks, the stuff that took me years—so many years—to write.
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Her thirty-seventh birthday arrives. She can’t afford to go out to dinner. I’m too old for this, she thinks. It was all supposed to happen by now.
Two months later, something—continual failure? Abject misery? The Grace of God?—makes her decide: I can’t live like this anymore.
Molly writes desperate letters to artist funding agencies. All to no avail.
It occurs to Molly that she only listened to half of Virginia Woolf’s famous maxim: A room of her own and five-hundred pounds a year.
She smiles weakly when she remembers that she planned to champion the luckless and downtrodden, not become one of them.
She blames herself: How could I have thought that sacrificing so much would guarantee me success? I was naïve! Self-absorbed! Stupid! It’s embarrassing.
She blames her parents: They could have helped me more.They should have helped me more. They could have been different people than they are! They should have been different people than they are!
She begins looking for jobs. At first, she worries that she will have to take a job that does not allow for writing time. When she’s still looking six months later, she applies for anything and everything she might be remotely qualified for.
Molly learns to “recast her experience in practical terms,” as the university career counselor explains. She doesn’t think about writing at all, as she works fifteen hours a week at a dental office; ten hours a week SAT tutoring, and untold hours teaching two writing classes while looking for a full-time job in what could be considered her spare time.
One year later, Molly finally lands a job as an office manager in a large dental office. She has never been so grateful to be chained to the crass demands of the economic system.
She wants to see her failure to get published as a grand tragedy. But tragedy is her friend Alice, six months pregnant, losing her baby; her sister’s best friend Susan dying in a freak diving accident at twenty-eight; her boss’s younger brother coming back from the war missing a leg, and half his mind. And on and on and on.
At the dentist’s office, Molly reorganizes the part-timers’ schedule; devises a new filing system that makes returning patients easier to find; charms the insurance company clerks on occasion to smooth the reimbursement of charges. Her colleagues are pleasant and professional and only occasionally cranky. She bonds with one of the dental hygienists over their shared love of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
She reads a lot, cooks frequently, and still checks out the free bands in the park. She still writes too, though the page that once seemed full of endless possibilities now appears to obscure as much as it illuminates.
Two or three times a month, several patients at the dental office inevitably say that they are disappointed that they had to wait so long for their appointments or that they weren’t told that their insurance carriers didn’t cover teeth polishing. To each one, Molly smiles her best smile and says, “I can certainly understand your disappointment.”
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Mary Lannon’s unpublished novel Tide Girl was a finalist for the 2023 PEN\Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. Her short stories have been published at Story, New World Writing and The Woven Tale Press among other outlets. At work on another novel, she teaches at Nassau Community College in Long Island. She lives in Queens and runs a reading series at her local cemetery (yes, cemetery). More information at MaryLannon.com