Sara Baume is a writer's writer, able to clothe her insights on life, art and human connection in beautifully evocative language. There are few living writers who can artistically convey compassion in a single sentence. Sara has given us all the gift of friendship with this book, but most importantly, has allowed us the privilege of getting to know Mollie through the creative lens of an unreliable memory -- Derek Owusu It was a wrench to let go of this beautiful book. Sara Baum has written - through a friendship that is both fully lived and dutifully examined - about place, art and the strange absolutes that lie in the corners of a creative life. Unforgettable, full of love and the life-affirming joy of having a friend -- Ben Pester Opening Night is a wonderful study of creativity and collaboration, ritual and repetition, and the power of art to connect us. But most of all, it shows just how a friendship can emerge reluctantly - but, crucially, organically - between two artists who each revel in their own reclusiveness. It hit me on many different levels -- Benjamin Myers A wonderful writer -- Max Porter Baume is a writer of outstanding grace and style. She writes beyond the time we live in -- Colum McCann Baume's writing is near faultless: instinctively balanced, precise and often surprising -- Melissa Harrison A writer touched by greatness -- Joseph O'Connor Sara Baume has as much in common with, say, Maggie Nelson as she does with Edna O'Brien * Times Literary Supplement * Opening Night is such a beautifully and carefully observed book. I felt like I was in conversation with Baume's thoughts the entire time I was reading it. This book made me think deeply about my own friendships, my creative practice and the place I've come to call home and, for this, I am profoundly grateful. No one knows their way round a quietly profound sentence quite like Sara Baume does -- Jan Carson Sara Baume's Opening Night is a unique and moving portrait of a friendship between an artist and a writer. It's so intimate and honest I felt bereft when I finished it. In her compelling, concise prose, Baume evokes what it means to devote your daily life to conjuring something new and true - and how complex and demanding an activity that is. I've never read anything like it -- Jennifer Higgie In this beautifully written and resonating book, Sara Baume has created an archive via the frame of friendship. Opening Night captures the mystery, infatuation, fantasy, and doubling that occurs in artmaking and between new friends. It is an impressive and generous work, chronicling the pandemic years with fine detail, questions, observations. I had the feeling, while reading, that I was encountering something completely of our time, something that will be read in the future -- Lauren Aimee Curtis For Sara Baume and Mollie Douthit, art is not an object consigned to the gallery walls but the very substance through which life emerges - vital, embodied, ritualistic, devoted; sometimes pained and ever open to being surprised. A deft, beautiful and deeply memorable book, Opening Night is like nothing I've read before -- Helen Jukes Opening Night conjures art-making as a beacon to find like-living people. Baume generously welcomes the reader into a burgeoning friendship and creative project, and the surreptitious routines and rituals that form both -- Jen Calleja Opening Night conjures Georges Perec, Annie Dillard and John Berger while remaining entirely itself. A generous and sustaining rumination on those tender places where art, friendship and life entwine -- Sue Rainsford Opening Night, Sara Baume's careful, precise mapping of her friendship with the painter Mollie Douthit, is a book about the necessity and cost, in all senses, of making art in our time - one of war, pandemics, global insecurity and fear, and a brutal, rising nationalism. Undemonstrative but packed with tension and deep-driven need, Opening Night movingly dramatises the dread loneliness and haunting futility that are the art maker's constant companions, and wins a quiet, tentative, but beautiful victory -- Howard Cunnell
