[REVIEW] The Half Life of Molly Pierce, by Katrina Leno

240 pages, $17.99

Review by Darlena Cunha

“There are long stretches where I don’t remember anything.”

The resonation of this sentence must be nearly universal. Memory is a mechanism of fancy, and thoughts come and go, sometimes as snapshots, still pictures that float up for just a moment from the dark pools of the mind, and sometimes as living, breathing creatures overtaking all current thought from the will of the beholder. And isn’t each memory a memory of a memory? Each time the image springs upon us anew, the emotions we carried the last time we thought of it cling to the ever-heavying frame until we can no longer discern the bones of what happened in that one instant from the myriad of outside forces having sullied them.

And these are merely the things that happen to those of us lucky enough to have inherited a brain chemistry considered “normal.”

Being stricken by depression is a struggle too many people go through alone. Whether they don’t get help at all, or are misdiagnosed, or even if they are diagnosed correctly and start on a regiment of pills meant to stabilize their thought patterns, they are alone. If their families ignore the problem, or their friends try to reach out in the inept way that teenagers do, or if everyone is as supportive and open as possible, they are alone. This is the truth author Katrina Leno captured while writing The Half Life of Molly Pierce, a tale of the trials of struggling with depression—the confusing and irritating and sudden lack of will to do anything, an anger at the body and mind, a sudden missing identity, a marked break from the person there just yesterday.

Sometimes 17-year-old Molly Pierce finds herself with no idea where she is or what she’s doing. Hours of her life have disappeared. Once she found herself driving to New York from her small town near Boston. She turned around. She went home, which is a theme seen multiple times throughout the novel. She clings to the life she doesn’t even know she wants out of sheer human tenacity, the biology of the spirit.

The pace is fast, moody, broken, bent. The pace is a teenager. It edges you on, splinters before you’re satisfied, and shows the importance in unimportant things. It is a thriller. It is a noir. But it is also perfectly placed for young readers, a blend of sophistication in technique and duality of tone.

When a teenage boy follows Molly home on his motorcycle, he dies. We find out she must know him, and yet she does not, and through this incident the entire world of Molly Pierce splits open for us like a pomegranate, its seeds spilling out over our dining room tables, clattering to the floor, and as we scramble to catch them, to pick up one at a time from the dusty tiles, we begin to put together the pieces of her life that are so deeply gone they nearly do not exist. Until they are the only things to exist.

As we follow Molly’s stream of consciousness through her life a year after her threat of suicide, we begin to realize her reality stands out amid the others, it calls for recognition. It demands acknowledgement.

From a feminist lens, this book is a striking and welcome divergence from the typical YA novel. It takes the now well-worn “Manic Pixie Dream girl” trope and flips it on its head.

Molly is the would-be manic pixie dream girl—a character that in a man’s movie about a man’s world would be a quirky bit of relief in the streamlined patriarchy serving no purpose other than to be eccentrically troubled yet bubbly, pushing the male protagonist out of his stoic, depressed solitude, and they are unquestionably girlish and feminine.

In Leno’s book, however, it is the teenager Lyle, who is the paper cut out. He drives after Molly in a frenzy of “but I’m such a nice guy”; he is eccentrically troubled, yet optimistic, and he pushes the female protagonist out of her depressed solitude.

Lyle is an outline, a shadow, and what is astounding about this is that it’s okay. We don’t need him. Molly doesn’t need him. He’s there to move the story, he’s there to help her. Finally. A static male character helping a dynamic female protagonist learn about herself and her life.

In The Half Life of Molly Pierce, Molly’s whole life centers on finding fulfillment from within. Which is how teenage years should be. Which is how we should remember them.

“And remembering something is what makes it real.”

***

Darlena Cunha is a former television producer turned freelance journalist and mom. She blogs daily at http://parentwin.com, and writes for TIME Magazine, The Washington Post, and The Gainesville Sun. She’s been published in McSweeney’s, Wired and OffBeat Families plus many more. You can find her on Twitter @parentwin.