Opening Night - by Sara Baume (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

As two women, both artists living and working along the coast of Ireland, come to know each other, we witness a profound meditation on friendship, mortality, creation, the everyday and the sublime.

One day, Sara Baume attended the closing party of an exhibition in West Cork. She fell under the spell of two small paintings.

Mollie Douthit of Grand Forks, North Dakota, was living and working, alone, in a cabin down an overgrown lane only a few miles away. Sara and Mollie made a quick start at friendship. They discovered much in common--a devotion to the daily rituals of their artistic practices, nature, walks, soup, solitude, grandmothers. They made a pact: every month, no matter the weather, they would swim in the Atlantic.

Mollie was preparing for a new exhibition, building a series of paintings from her memories of a house on a Minnesota lake, one that had belonged to her grandparents when she was a child. She asked Sara to write the accompanying text. The pictures privileged impression over reality, rummaging in the vast, specific, slippery landscape of Mollie's mind. Sara set herself the challenge of writing a book that might work in the same way, portraying a series of events from memory while simultaneously insisting on the freedom to misremember, subtract, and embellish. Soon, though, Sara and Mollie encountered a tumult of change. Mysterious pain, long-distance love, lost family, the fear of failure: these and other realities barged into their story.

Unusual in its intimacy, scope, and emphasis on the lives and practices of two unknown contemporary artists, Opening Night is nearly mystical in its exploration of what connects us to the past, the sublime, each other, and our selves.

Review Quotes

"There is so much to admire in Opening Night. It's a beautiful depiction of the great support that can build between artists if they are not competitive, but admiring of each other . . . [The pictures] add extra insight into this extraordinary book, a work that celebrates high art while being a wonderful example of it."
--John Boyne, Irish Times

"[A] clever, moving mosaic of a book . . . Beguil-ing . . . There is much to be gleaned about art--its praxis and the status of being 'an artist.' It is astute about the con-flict-ing emo-tions of a work being sold: money vs loss. It comes close to a pro-vi-sional defin-i-tion of art."
--Stuart Kelly, Spectator (Australia)

"Beautifully realised . . . Engaging."
--Norma Clarke, Literary Review

"[Baume] examines her relationship with painter Mollie Douthit in this evocative memoir . . . This deceptively simple account contains its own fraught and joyful war of memories."
--Publisher's Weekly

"Sara Baume evokes what it means to devote your daily life to conjuring something new and true--and how complex and demanding an activity that is. I've never read anything like it."
--Jennifer Higgie, author of The Other Side

"Opening Night conjures Georges Perec, Annie Dillard, and John Berger while remaining entirely itself. A generous and sustaining rumination on those tender places where art, friendship, and life entwine."
--Sue Rainsford, author of Follow Me to the Ground

"A deft, beautiful, and deeply memorable book, Opening Night is like nothing I've read before."
--Helen Jukes, author of A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings

"Opening Night is a wonderful study of creativity and collaboration, ritual and repetition, and the power of art to connect us. It hit me on many different levels."
--Benjamin Myers, author of Rare Singles

"This book made me think deeply about my own friendships, my creative practice, and the place I've come to call home. No one knows their way round a quietly profound sentence quite like Sara Baume." --Jan Carson, author of Quickly, While They Still Have Horses

"A moving and honest account of a friendship. Compulsive, and almost novelistic. It really spoke to me about what we value, what's important in life, and what actually matters at the end of the day."
--Sinéad Gleeson, author of Constellations

"There are few living writers who can artistically convey compassion in a single sentence. Sara Baume has given us all the gift of friendship with this book."
--Derek Owusu, author of That Reminds Me

About the Author

Sara Baume is the author of the novel Spill Simmer Falter Wither, among other books. Her work has won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, an Irish Book Award, the Rooney Prize, the E.M. Forster Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and been short-listed for the Goldsmiths Prize, the Costa First Novel Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the Rathbones Folio Prize. She was named a Best Young British Novelist by Granta in 2023.