i am mary dunne

I Am Mary Dunne by Brian Moore (Viking Press, 1968)

An odd book, both brave and foolish, that begins promisingly and then slowly deteriorates into tedious melodrama.

Mary Dunne grew up in a small village in Nova Scotia and got away as quickly as she could by eloping with a high school friend who just happened to have a ticket out.  She ends up, after two more marriages, living the high life in 1960s New York: married to a nice, sexy British playwright and man-about-town, living in a two-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side, lunching with friends, drinking, and feeling hysterically depressed — perhaps because she’s about to have  her period or perhaps because she’s crazy and suicidal.  So during a long NYC day she reviews her entire life for her own (but mostly the reader’s) benefit: her attempts to be a writer and an actress, her mostly disastrous marriages.  The frequent shifts between the past and the present are often unwelcome, and the reader feels tugged around.  Moore is a skillful writer but despite his extensive examination of his character’s gynecological and sexual experiences, Mary Dunne remains rather fake: distant and unlikeable, and the microscopic attention that this book pays to her begins to seem unwarranted, and finally rather boring.