The writer Molly McCloy was in Chicago this past July, celebrating her birthday.
“I stayed in all day, reading final galleys of my book,” she told me when I phoned to ask how she’d spent her special day. She was referring to her memoir, Nine Grudges: The Spiteful Origins of the Happiest Dyke on Earth, which is scheduled to be published by Red Hen Press on September 8. The book, set mostly in Midtown Phoenix, is about McCloy’s complicated childhood relationship with her abusive father.
“I write about how I had idealized him,” she said, “until about 25 years ago when I found out that my brothers were both addicted to heroin. That’s when I had to say to myself, ‘Oh, my family is more messed up than I thought.’”
The nine grudges of the title are those McCloy had long held against her father, a former reporter for The Arizona Republic. When she was 22, she wrote him a letter demanding apologies for each affront, like the time he laughed at her heartfelt, little-girl birthday greeting, or when, in a fit of pique, he kicked tween Molly in the stomach.
“I was really reticent to write about this, at first,” she admitted. “I didn’t want to break my mom’s heart, because she was a great mom. I didn’t want to hurt my dad, because I knew his own childhood was so bad. But I also didn’t want to let him off the hook.”
She doesn’t. Her stories are full of dark humor, introspection and lots of personal accountability – and revisiting those moments was not easy. “I wasn’t sure I could do it. It meant embodying that pain again.”
She persevered, and her completed manuscript won the Quill Prose Award, an annual literary contest hosted by Red Hen Press. First prize was a publishing deal with Red Hen; the book can be found at brick-and-mortar stores like Changing Hands Books, where McCloy will host a public book launch on September 15.
I told Molly how parts of the book felt like a love letter to suburban Phoenix – its grapefruit trees and canal banks and the giant “S” painted onto Sunnyslope Mountain. She responded with a lovely thought about our expansive skies and spirit. “You know, nobody writes good things about Phoenix,” she said. “People remember Hunter S. Thompson’s quote about how horrible Phoenix is. I wanted to capture something else.”
In the book, McCloy reprints her father’s response to her letter in its entirety.
“I was blown away by what he wrote,” she confessed. “I wasn’t expecting it. He thought he’d done so much better than his father, who was horrible to him, and that that was enough. But he’s done some therapy and you can see a new level of self-reflection in the letter he wrote to me.”
While she waits for her father to read Nine Grudges, McCloy is at work on its sequel, a lesbian love story of sorts, set in grunge-era Seattle. “It might help assuage my dad’s guilt to have this story out there,” she said. “I hope so. In the meantime, I think he’s mostly just proud of me for writing a book.”
– Robrt L. Pela
Read It!
I’ve Got a New Complaint: Essays on Aging Disgracefully and Other Small Disasters
Phoenix-raised Laurie Notaro’s new collection of essays is a riotous good time. From familial relationships to the challenges of aging, the range of topics covered by the former Arizona Republic columnist spans wide, and she writes about each with deft humor. “This is what happens post-middle age: Your toenails grow at incredible speed to remind you about hygiene,” Notaro writes. And Phoenicians are likely to love all Notaro’s local references: One story mentions both the Apple Store and a Scottsdale Chico’s shop in an opening line.
– Bella Mazzilli
