The Molly Fire: A Memoir

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

Michael Mitchell is an anthropologist, a filmmaker, a photographer, and
the author of Monsters, a study of photographer Charles Eisenmann,
renowned for his photos of “freaks.” In 2000 Mitchell’s mother,
the artist Molly Greene Mitchell, died in Victoria a year after the
death of his father. Almost as soon as the author walked into her James
Bay house for the required “picking and packing,” he began to take
photographs: “Where she would have drawn, I take simple pictures.
It’s comforting. It’s clarifying.” Before he left, he made a
bonfire.

The result of this tidying up of his mother’s life is an
impressionistic memoir, written with panache, that takes dizzying jumps
in time and space that initially may leave a reader reeling. By the time
Mitchell admits that his book is composed of Post-its, memories jotted
down on yellow scraps of paper whenever and wherever they came to him,
the reader has settled down to savour the flow of memories, letters,
diary entries, menus, dance programs … and also to enjoy the random
but always perceptive comments by a writer who sees.

Sadly, in a book so lovingly presented, there remain a few copy-editing
oversights. Despite the title, the words are not all about Molly. They
tell also of grandparents and great-grandparents, and in particular of
Mitchell’s father, who served in the wartime navy. Father and son did
not have a great relationship, but the first photograph that Mitchell
made as a child was of his father. Many years later he reprinted the
image six times in one frame to show his father retreating into the
distance, creating a piece that hung in galleries and eventually
appeared on a record cover—at which point his father tried to sue him.


The artwork in the book is a great pleasure. Sandwiched between
endpapers of Molly’s paint tubes and her son’s film boxes, the
colour photographs are mostly by the author, and the spot illustrations
scattered throughout the pages include photos of objects dear to his
parents and many sketches made by his mother. No portrait of Molly. Only
a wealth of what she left behind.