upcoming grant deadline: 05/15/2024

upcoming grant deadline: 05/15/2024

Molly Layton

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2003 Seedling Award

I do not always write about middle-aged women whose husbands have suddenly left them, but I almost always write from the point of view of older women who contain within themselves a multiplicity, as Whitman would put it, a range of competing impulses and perspectives which do not neatly resolve. Although my topic is the well-worn woman's topic of gender and family, I explore women later in life, when the incongruities pile up, blows fall, the self arrives in a startling new place where secure and treasured assumptions do not hold. That amazes me, the emergence of a person who just possibly grows in complexity, in the increasing capacity to tolerate some serious questions. Such as, How near do we come to happiness? Or clarity? What are the many, many varieties of love? How does dying shape living? Can we get out of this life without harming others?

Often I write nonfiction, in my own voice, pushing my tolerance of unthinkable thoughts.

But more and more these days I write short fiction. Sometimes the protagonist is, like myself, a psychotherapist. Always she becomes a way to explore incongruous and competing layers of subjectivity.


A psychologist in private practice, Molly Layton writes essays for the Psychotherapy Networker, a magazine which won a National Magazine Award based in part on her writing. She was born in Texas, studied philosophy at the University of Texas, but after the birth of her two children and the family's move to Philadelphia, she gained her doctorate in clinical psychology from Temple University. Son David is a filmmaker in Austin, Texas, and daughter Rebecca is a faculty artist teaching silk screening at the new Applied Art Institute in Amagansatt, Long Island. "I watched the kids makes themselves into artists," Molly says, "and while I noticed that artists' lives lack certain securities, such as automobiles and health insurance, I have nonetheless followed them into it." Her short fiction, "Senseless," was nominated by Carve Magazine for publication in the Pushcart Anthology 2000.
 

"We have three children," Mel says. Something changes in his eyes, his voice, something narrows. "Matt's in graduate school, Franny's a law clerk here in Philadelphia. Our younger son Gary died eighteen months ago."

That explains the black weight between them.

"Flu," Cora says. "No one dies of the flu. He was swept away. You never get over it."

"But you go on," Mel says. There's an argument for you, Dr. Blakey thinks. I'm on the side of never getting over it.

"I know I haven't been myself," Cora says, and it's true, you could see that, whoever she has become now - the dry, becalmed face, thin arms framing a hollowed-out chest - it's not what she had ever wished.

"I can guess what you're thinking," Mel says, "You've probably seen this before. A loss like this, then the marriage suffers."

"You're right," Dr. Blakey says, "I've seen it before."

"After a while you just want a little relief."

"You mean, have an affair," Dr. Blakey says.

"Right," Mel says, "That's how it started." Unmoved, Cora looks at him; she knows this part. "Then I got caught up. Fell in love, I guess."

Dr. Blakey is stirred to see his lips trembling in an otherwise dignified face. She has kept, despite the years, a certain polite and tender heart. In fact she would say that is part of her job, to keep that tender heart. But she has nothing but cynicism for the act of falling in love. Nature's trick, it seems to her. It's the harder parts of loving that interest her. The tender heart is for their losing a child.

"Tell me something, Mel," she says, "What happened to you when Gary died."

"He didn't cry then, that's for sure," Cora says.

 

- from The Drunkard's Search

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