Molly’s Odyssey is based on the last chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses, often referred to as, ‘Molly’s Soliloquy.’

This chapter is Molly's musings, her thoughts, her concerns, some of her worries and, above all, her sexual and romantic fantasies and memories. It is a sexy, passionate, and profoundly human meditation. Molly is robustly frank about her bodily functions and generously open in her emotional responses to men, women, religion and social mores. The result is a chapter that feels intensely alive.

It is 4am and Molly awaits the return of her philandering husband, Leopold Bloom. At the same time as she berates him she recalls her own affairs, fantasises about going shopping with her current lover and buying new underwear, and dreams of ‘filling the house with roses.’ She curses the maid, ‘stealing the oysters,’ but goes on to remark on the abundant beauty of women’s bodies, and her own in particular. She wishes she was a man so she could enjoy her own womanly curves, and then remembers her first kiss, as a teenage girl in Gibralta. I gave her Moorish style castle to dream in, rather than what I suspect would have been a damp, cold Dublin house. She has an endless supply of roses, a gorgeous new petticoat, and a luxury brass bead to dream on. I have also updated her, giving her a laptop to start writing her own ‘erotic fiction,’ at which she clearly excels.

The model is Rebecca Chance who also writes under the name of Lauren Henderson. Lauren writes both ‘erotic thrillers,’ and crime fiction. I asked her to be ‘my Molly,’ partly because she looks exactly as I imagine Molly would have done, were she a real woman not a fictional character, but also because Molly is a thoroughly contemporary character. She feels a real now as she would have done over hundred years ago when the book was written.