Pieces of Molly: An ordinary life

A new book has just been published in the UK by the writer Judith Gurney.  Judith and her husband Andrew Baldwin  have been residents of Barga Vecchia  for many years.

The book is entitled “Pieces of Molly: An ordinary life” and is Judith Gurney‘s captivating memoir which examines the boundaries between memory and imagination, illusion and hope.

Pieces of Molly is a memoir with a difference told in the first and third person, it gives us a perspective on the self not often found in autobiographies. Molly can be seen as every child the author and the reader too. Judith Gurney’s  unusual approach to her memoir offers a multifaceted piecing together of a life, in which she acknowledges the unreliability of memory  and examines how we often recreate ourselves to fit in with others hopes and desires as well as our own.

This memoir is for anyone curious about the process of change and the transition from childhood to adulthood, with all its joys and terrors,  the changing relationships of parents to their children, children to parents says Judith

Marley’s journey starts as everyone does in the womb.  Pieces of Molly,  set in an agricultural community of 50 years ago, is a map of one small girl’s mind, as the barely subdued ordinary terrors of childhood lurk around the world.  She is surrounded by the vibrant life of a working farm by the sea, at a time when rapid developments are forcing the world to change.  Molly is a curious little detective,  keen to find out more about life and love.  For her, the shadows behind the doors only make sense in hindsight, and buried family secrets come to light as he struggles with the problem of how and who to be in the world.

As a psychoanalytic  psychotherapist  for more than 20 years,  I have heard many stories,  from differing points of view,  and something I’ve seen over time is that  memoir is usually present the writer’s version as a single truth. In Pieces of Molly  I’m suggesting a more nuanced idea about how memories –  no memory is ever a finished thing. – Judith Gurney

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Pieces of Molly is a psychological thriller — it just doesn’t fall into the normal categories of that genre. Instead of featuring undercover spies or murder mysteries, it pursues the little mined psychological territory of childhood: the dynamics of how one progresses from the trauma of birth through a mix of irrational fears and delightful discoveries to becoming a person on the verge of adolescence.

Judith Gurney brings the particulars of her childhood alive: her involvement with chickens and exciting tractor rides along with her absorbing interaction with a peculiarly cold mother and an adoring father. At times her probing touches the rumblings of tectonic plates colliding beneath the apparently benign exterior her family presents to the world. The description is made more nuanced by the writer’s ability to shift seamlessly from her point of view as a child into reflections of her adult self as she cares for her ageing parents.

The book’s subtitle is “an ordinary life.” How is growing up on a largish farm in a rural England that no longer exists, with a family fraught with scandalous secrets, “ordinary?” It would seem quite the reverse, but as the reader accompanies Gurney in her personal exploration, the vast common ground of everyone’s childhood emerges. Presented with such detailed recall, the reader is plunged into memories of similar experiences. We all share the fierce fears and jealousies along with the insights of childhood — only few of us have reflected on them in such depth and even fewer have been able to write of them with such lucidity. It is the gripping drama of childhood itself that is “ordinary.”

This book makes us remember our own childhoods, with its terrors, yes, but also with its wonderment. At one point Molly speaks of playing a game with infinity. “Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? I had a bucket with a picture of Contrary Mary on it, and she herself held a similar bucket. I stood in front of the central mirror, holding mine. Try as I would I couldn’t make out the picture on her bucket, but I knew it was there, Contrary Mary and the bucket receding infinitely, like Alice getting smaller and smaller and ending up in a totally different dimension. . . Was someone infinitely larger than me, I wondered, holding a bucket with me as a picture on it?”

Molly’s many questions remind us of the innate ability of a child’s mind to ask ultimate questions, mathematical ones, and ones about the very nature of existence. A child’s fresh responses to life are truly extraordinary, but their universality makes them ordinary. Don’t miss the joy of revisiting these insights yourself.

Solace Wales

Dr Judith Edwards is a consultant child and adolescent psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic, UK where she also lectures and teaches. She was Course Tutor for the MA in Psychoanalytic Studies for ten years.

Apart from publishing papers in academic journals internationally, she has contributed to many books including most recently The Emotional Experience of Adoption, Acquainted with the Night: Psychoanalysis and the Poetic Imagination and she also conceived and edited Being Alive: on the work of Anne Alvarez.

She has also edited many psychoanalytic books, including Live Company by Anne Alvarez, Arctic Spring: Potential for Growth in Adults with Psychosis and Autism by Laura Tremelloni, and Psychotherapy with Young People in Care by Margaret Hunter.

Under her family name Judith Gurney she has published a memoir of the first 10 years of life, called Pieces of Molly: An ordinary life.