Savage Dublin - Honor Molloy’s ‘Smarty Girl’ memoir

Cahir O'Doherty speaks with Honor Molloy about her debut

Molly’s family was one of those families in crisis. A local schoolteacher saw the first unmistakable signal that something was wrong in the Molloy house when she set them an assignment to write their life story. Molloy’s then 13-year-old sister handed in a 20-eight page handwritten essay, something the teacher had never seen before.

“She wrote an account of my father beating my mother. It was an accurate account and I kept the language she wrote it in as much as possible throughout the book. I was like a magpie, I took all the elements and I wove it all together,” says Molloy with a dispassion that belies the cost of those matter of fact words.

As an American woman in Ireland, Molloy’s mother was often mystified by the familiar strangeness of the Irish. They spoke the same language but they did not usually mean the same things in it.

It was their remarkable distaste for anything confrontational or unpleasant that struck her most. They’d cross the street and even the city to avoid a potential reckoning.

Any American woman is going to have a hard time in Ireland, sooner or later, because directness isn’t valued there.  It’s avoided, and any attempt to make people account for themselves is seen as impermissibly gauche.

“Shut up you stupid big Yank,” they told her. “You and your feelings,” they added, for good measure.

Reading Smarty Girl can give you a sensation of vertigo as you realize what the young and all too innocent narrator cannot -- that her situation is broken beyond repair and whatever her future holds her present is blighted.

It had all begun so promisingly. In the early 1950s her mother had come to Ireland from the U.S. to study at Trinity College to write her thesis on the plays of J.M. Synge and get her PhD. One day she met a young actor who had heard about her actor training classes and he invited himself along.

A gifted actor himself, Molloy’s father has a satirist’s eye for character, and soon she’s watching him mercilessly lampooning her Trinity friends (and herself) on stage to a cheering Dublin audience.

They become an item, and soon they’ve moved from pocket-sized theaters to the Olympia and the Gate (two of the most celebrated theaters in the city).

Molly’s mother was charmed at her father’s gift for finding and embodying Dublin’s raft of eccentrics on stage. Often they were riotously funny, sometimes they were heartbreaking, and the one thing they had in common was that they had never been seen on the Dublin stage before.

He became a star doing it. It led to him being offered a role on Ireland’s first major televised soap opera Tolka Row. That made him a household name.

“My mother says his decline started after he had a show that failed on Broadway in 1963,” says Molloy. “His long slide into depression and destruction to mania followed that. He was driven to destroy himself. I think it was all of the s*** that had happened to him in his Dublin childhood.”

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