Houseguests

When I was eleven and we lived in London, I was invited to spend the weekend with a school friend. What I remember was the family spoke Hebrew and never translated anything and also they ate weird food. It was not a happy experience. At eighteen, the summer before I went to college, I spent a month in Ireland, travelling around and ended up as a house guest to a family friend, a very famous writer with a wife who was much younger and would eventually run off with an even richer man. Anyway, I arrived at the gate of their massive manor house and as I walked up the driveway with my backpack, two of the largest dogs I had ever seen in my life silently appeared on either side of me to escort me to the front door of what resembled a palace. When I knocked, a window above was opened and this woman, a very pretty, naked women draped in the curtain, came out on the balcony and told me to wait.

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Molly Moynahan
Writing: An Argument

What does it feel like to be a writer? Sometimes it’s the best thing in the world, your vision is clear, and you are amazed by your own brilliance. This is nice but it doesn’t last, and it doesn’t mean the people won’t say things that hurt your feelings or make you doubt every choice you have made in your life. Also, you hurt people. You remember things they don’t want to be reminded of and anyway, your version is wrong. They are angry to be part of your story, and they feel wounded while you have tried to find some truth, to trace the origin of important things and to convey how these things affected you. Norman Mailer once told me as we walked down the street after a meeting at the Actor’s Studio that my life as a writer would be terrible. He said it smiling and kindly and in terms of expressing his belief that I had talent, but it was a sobering moment. Briefly, I had felt blessed and filled with optimism but now I understand what he meant, what my father meant, what that guy, possibly Hemingway said about it being like opening a vein. We drink, we kill ourselves, we are bad parents, we cheat on our loved ones, and we lie, boy, do we lie.

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Molly Moynahan
Exercise: A Journey

When I started in a new private school in tenth grade, a really bad time to start a new school, the one thing I achieved that felt good was being on the girls’ soccer team. It was the first girls’ soccer team in New Jersey and we were a feisty, if not a highly skilled group. But we got better. One day my mother came back from the grocery store and said some strange woman had accosted her at the checkout line and went into raptures about how fast I was.

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Molly Moynahan