That Green Eyed Girl
New York City, 1975: Ava, an adolescent girl, struggles to cope with her unstable, chain-smoking, unwashed mother, who eventually has to be hospitalised, when a mysterious box turns up, all the way from Paris, containing crumpled unfinished love letters and a photograph across which is scrawled ‘Liar.’ Ava discovers that two women, Gillian and Dovie, as lovers, once shared the apartment she lives in now. Their story, from twenty years earlier, is told in alternating chapters. They would lose their jobs as school-teachers were their private love to be revealed, as well as risk arrest and a ‘cure’ in a mental institution. Their colleague, the malevolent, unlovable Judith, discovers their secret and comes to squat like an incubus in the apartment where she works implacably to part them, her victims powerless to fight back.
Moylan describes a New York City where women meet in secret clubs, fear of arrest making some suspicious of the motives of their companions. Dovie finds a kind of peace eventually in Paris, evoked with all the charming shabbiness of films of the period. The theme of thwarted love runs through both narratives: the agony of Ava’s unrequited devotion to a boy who inevitably falls instead for one of the ‘popular’ girls, the devotion of Dovie’s apparently contented sister to the memory of a man her world would never have accepted, and Ava’s mother’s own unspeakable secret. Moylan writes beautifully in this, her debut novel. Ava’s sufferings are ‘…like a broken bone that hadn’t set properly. I just learned to walk differently.’ There is laughter, ‘but the kind that sounded like a wrong note on a piano.’
