Opening Night

by Sara Baume

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.

240 pages, Kindle Edition

Expected publication July 2, 2026

About the author

Sara Baume is an Irish novelist.
Her father is of English descent while her mother is of Irish descent. As her parents travelled around in a caravan, Sara Baume was born "on the road to Wigan Pier". When she was 4, they moved to County Cork, Ireland. She studied fine art at Dun Laoghaire College of Art and Design and creative writing at Trinity College, Dublin from where she was awarded her MPhil. She has received a Literary Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Her books are published by Tramp Press in Ireland and Heinemann in Britain.
In 2015, she participated in the International Writing Program's Fall Residency at the University of Iowa, in Iowa City, IA.

Reviews

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I rarely asked Mollie very probing questions about the practical considerations of her paintings. Part of me assumed that I would not fully understand her answers anyway, but a larger part of me enjoyed the process of guessing the answers for myself, of crafting a mythology. I was not able to afford to purchase any of her work, but as time went by I came to feel as if I had a greater stake in the ownership of certain paintings than the people who had paid for them and brought them home, due to the time I had spent thinking and looking; due to the opinions I had shaped around the works themselves, separate from their maker.” Sara Baume has long been a favourite of mine — her three novels are endlessly excellent, and her memoir handiwork is an all-time favourite — so of course I couldn’t wait to read her new memoir, Opening Night. (Literally couldn’t wait; I begged for a proof the second I could and started reading it as soon as it arrived.) Here, Baume writes about a period of her life marked in particular by her friendship with the artist Mollie Douthit, and through this friendship comes to reflect on the world around her, threatened by environmental calamity, political unrest and pandemics, but redeemed through art and humanity and mutual care. Reading this book nearing the end of a pretty bleak winter, I could feel my heart warming and opening; it made me think of the friendships in my life that mean so much to me and nourish me, and the art that does the same. I’ve not stopped thinking, since finishing the book, about my own relationship to art: what draws me to partake in its witnessing as well as its creation, what I get from it and what I can give to it. It also renewed my love for Baume’s work, of course, my gratitude for her steady eye, her curiosity, and her unerring sentences; and what’s more it introduced me, through Baume’s evocative descriptions and some reproductions, to Douthit’s work, so rich and shining with wry interest in the world, a quality the two share in spades. I can’t recommend enough reading it when it’s out on 2 July — and thanks so much to Granta for the early proof.

[Derek Withshire · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another excellent novel from Sara Baume.