I was in a small independent bookshop in Clapham when I came across Opening Night (2026) by Sara Baume. I have a self-imposed rule that I can’t leave an independent bookshop empty-handed – yes, very self-sacrificial, I know – and I am increasingly drawn to the memoir section if I don’t have anything else obvious to purchase. For the past five or six years, we seem to have been in a particularly interesting time for memoirs, often by otherwise un-famous people. Baume doesn’t fall into that category, because she is already a noted author, but I didn’t know that when I bought Opening Night.
The book tells of the friendship between Baume and Mollie Douthit. Mollie is an American artist who has moved to Ireland to pursue her art, and Sara is an Irish author. Neither has achieved riches from her creativity, but both recognise in each other the single-minded, emotionally complex mind of a fellow artist.
The two first meet at Sara’s friend Sue’s – I wouldn’t usually use first names of author and subject like this, but something about the book makes it feel more appropriate. Sue ‘has organised a group exhibition in her partially constructed eco-house’, which tells you everything about the sort of milieu we’re in. It is a world where people care deeply about creativity and shared experiences and introducing like-minded people to one another.
At the exhibition, Sara’s attention is arrested by a painting showing a bedroom. She describes it, though thankfully it is one of many artworks printed in the book (and you can see it here).’I feel as it I were seeing the room from multiple directions at once,’ writes Sara. ‘There was something synchronously ordered and disorientating about it, inviting and confining.’
After quizzing the host, Sara learns that Mollie lives near her – and that’s the organic beginning of a friendship that is the light of this book. So few books – fiction or non-fiction – give adult friendship the attention it deserves. I loved the way she tells of their closeness, its ebbs and flows, its obstacles and oases. She gives friendship the same value as romantic relationship, and recognises the glories and the pitfalls in the same way.
The book is also, of course, a portrait of an artist. As you can tell from that snippet above, Sara Baume knows how to write perceptively about art, and indeed she has written many essays for art catalogues. But, as she explains, she prefers to do that through the lens of her own experiences and emotions – how she responds to the artwork she is seeing. Opening Night is something of a book-length attempt to do that. I really appreciated how many of Mollie’s paintings are reproduced in the book, but also the explanations of how and when Sara saw them – and sometimes an invitation into the artistic process behind them.
Then she pointed to the part of the painting where the bird’s feet intersected with the railing and said that’s why I am not a real painter, and laughed, and it took me a few moments and a closer look to understand what she meant. There was a ridge running through the feet following the line of the iron beneath, and a real painter would have known from the beginning to leave a gap in the black to create a perch, or a real painter would have made the mistake but corrected it with sandpaper and linseed and all the original shades of blue and black and umber, making it flush again. But Mollie had noticed, and chosen instead to celebrate the flaw, to point it out to me, and I thought about this often over the following months, about how she always knew exactly what she was trying to achieve in a painting, even when it might appear to others to be a strange choice. I thought about how Mollie seemed to be completely in control of her paintings, and considerably less in control of her life.
It is a book that is being lived as it is being written. After a certain point, the subject and the author both know that their relationship will become another work of art, in the form of Opening Night, and that leads to one of the most interesting paragraphs in the book:
She sent me a text message that evening, a question. She wanted to know what I singled out to write about the day we had just spent together, and for the first time since the beginning of all the writing I felt suddenly defeated. I could never get it all down, I thought, or even come close. The things that stood out in my memory varied from moment to moment. I would never be able to corral it all into a single form, to tell a coherent story. And I understood then, better than ever, why Mollie painted in the jarring way she did, how each composition was a war of memories, a prodigious compression, a sympathetic compromise.
Despite knowing that Mollie is likely to read the book, Sara writes with candour throughout. There is a certain jealousy when Mollie’s romantic relationship with a man in another country starts to deepen. There are moments of frustration and misunderstanding. It had, in fact, the mingling of honesty and love that normally only comes in memoirs written about a friend who has died.
We get to know Mollie as a person and as an artist. And one very moving, involving element was not part of the book’s scope initially: Mollie develops severe pain in her teeth. Endless trips to dentists and doctors do not seem to offer lasting solutions, and this pain becomes one of the dominant factors in Mollie’s life – and in their friendship. When Mollie updates Sara, it is often about the pain first, and the art later. It’s amazing she’s able to continue creating at all. At various times in my life, I’ve had significant, distracting, non-life-threatening pain that doctors (and sometimes dentists) have been unable to diagnose and it is rare to see that experience reflected. I hadn’t expected it in the book, but I found it one of the more emotive threads.
I’ve read a few books about artists recently, and Opening Night really stands out for how it considers relationship and art, intertwined. Baume (back to last names!) is an excellent, subtle, thoughtful writer – she treads the line excellently between straightforward narrative and philosophical reflection. It never feels unnecessarily flowery, but she manages to get to real poetic depth in her writing. I thought it was an exceptionally interesting, unusual and immersive book, and I’m so glad I made the spontaneous purchase.