“you wake — dry mouth, mussed hair, your body heat rising,
two eyes on one side of your face, mouth twisted
like a flounder, the bottom-feeder you have become.”
(from The First Worst Thing)
‘Wives are afraid of me now.’ From the opening line of Fallen there is a sense of danger and intimacy. In her latest and most risqué collection Audrey Molloy asks: What makes a good person? What does it mean to be a fallen woman? And can she ever redeem herself? ‘You are one side of an abyss. Everything decent, the other.’
Among an inventive repertoire of forms Fallen is laced with a series of poems that convey the thoughts and confusion of a woman in crisis. Expanding its vision to track the fallen woman through history, religion and myth Fallen offers better endings for some of the tragic heroines of novel and opera for whom Audrey Molloy speaks. While the poems mine the exquisite pain, joy and persistent guilt of an illicit love affair and expose post-separation social opprobrium at the core of this collection is the most tender of love stories. ‘And then a skylight opened for each of us.’
Read Audrey Molloy's article, 'What Does it Mean to Be a Fallen Woman' in The Irish Times (October 2025)
'The poems in Fallen, my new collection, explore in part how the early programming of “feminine ideals”, through art and literature, can perpetuate self-damning and social condemnation. The poems also attempt to reclaim some of these tragic heroines, or at the very least imagine a different ending to their stories . . . What makes a good person? Can a good person leave a spouse who is also a good person? Can a person who has chosen self over others ever redeem themselves? And should they need to? Is it a given, if they break a vow, that they are immoral? How long does a bad person need to be punished for? These are some of the questions that Fallen grapples with. But at the heart of the collection is a love story, albeit heavily laced with guilt:
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| Weight | 180 g |
|---|---|
| Choose Type | Hardback, Paperback |
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Reviews
‘Audrey Molloy’s Fallen begins in the fallout of an affair, as the speaker steps back into public life and finds her position altered: ‘Wives are afraid of me now’ . . . they smile at her ‘the way people smile / at leopards through glass’ . . . Fallen is a book about sex written with the full knowledge of its limits . . . Desire does not rearrange the architecture. It arrives late, into a life already structured and must exist within it . . .
The poems don’t stage a glamorous double life; they stage a blurred one, where art, appetite, and aftermath refuse clean separation . . . Music does not absolve the affair; it heightens it, briefly restoring the body to a prior register . . .
Fallen treats adultery as one wound among others, not the axis of a woman’s life. It is a mature book, wary of innocence and absolution alike . . . ’
— Bronwyn Léa, Australian Book Review
In writing of a modern ‘fallen’ woman, Audrey Molloy’s weapons are humour and a fine precision.
Audrey Molloy in Fallen (Gallery, €12.50) writes of a modern “fallen” woman, in the sun-drenched landscape of Australia . . . Molloy’s weapons are humour and a fine precision.
Her light touch could belie her hard-won freedom, but, although she’s far removed from early 20th-century Ireland, society still judges: “Wives are afraid of me now… almost accidental it sounds! Fallen –/ as though I’d lost my footing… men stride forth/ with purpose… A wife neither falls nor leaps – she ditches into the dark hands of the sea . . . ”
Haunted by the unforgettable faithless wives of fiction – “Oh, I read the Russian novels/ (and you are not sure now if I mean read or read” – there is something of the novel in Fallen as it recounts the tortuous twists and turns of its racy survivor . . .
Molloy’s most pitiless gaze is reserved for herself and this is what gives her quiet wickedness its power . . .
— Martina Evans, The Irish Times
Book Information
Publication date: 1 October 2025
Details: 72pp
ISBN PBK: 978 1 91737 102 5
ISBN HBK: 978 1 91737 103 2
Cover: ‘Suspended 3’ (2014) by Chloe Early, oil on aluminium panel
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