As two women, both artists living and working along the coast of Ireland, come to know each other, we witness a profound meditation on friendship, mortality, creation, the everyday and the sublime.

One day, Sara Baume attended the closing party of an exhibition in West Cork. She fell under the spell of two small paintings.

Mollie Douthit of Grand Forks, North Dakota, was living and working, alone, in a cabin down an overgrown lane only a few miles away. Sara and Mollie made a quick start at friendship. They discovered much in common—a devotion to the daily rituals of their artistic practices, nature, walks, soup, solitude, grandmothers. They made a pact: every month, no matter the weather, they would swim in the Atlantic.

Mollie was preparing for a new exhibition, building a series of paintings from her memories of a house on a Minnesota lake, one that had belonged to her grandparents when she was a child. She asked Sara to write the accompanying text. The pictures privileged impression over reality, rummaging in the vast, specific, slippery landscape of Mollie’s mind. Sara set herself the challenge of writing a book that might work in the same way, portraying a series of events from memory while simultaneously insisting on the freedom to misremember, subtract, and embellish. Soon, though, Sara and Mollie encountered a tumult of change. Mysterious pain, long-distance love, lost family, the fear of failure: these and other realities barged into their story.

Unusual in its intimacy, scope, and emphasis on the lives and practices of two unknown contemporary artists, Opening Night is nearly mystical in its exploration of what connects us to the past, the sublime, each other, and our selves.