1970s

The 1970s in Firefly Lane are more than a period setting: they are the remembered landscape in which Tully Hart and Kate Mularkey’s friendship takes shape, and the measure by which they later understand what they have shared. The decade’s midnight bike rides, music, and intimate language return in Kate’s dreams and in her final days, turning youthful memories into a way of recognizing love and holding on to it.

A decade made of keepsakes and letters

At eleven, Tully begins a scrapbook with the hope that one day it will show her absent mother what she missed. Its first page is blank except for the date and the start of a letter to her mother. She gradually fills the books with school and sports photographs, movie ticket stubs, and accounts of good days, saving receipts and tickets as proof of where she had been. The record is not entirely neutral: she sometimes embellishes her stories, hoping that her mother might one day be proud of her. The scrapbook makes the decade’s passage tangible while revealing how much Tully longs to be seen by someone who is not there.

The friendship supplies a different kind of record. After separation, Tully and Kate write faithfully for three years. On Sunday evenings, Tully sits at her white desk in her lavender-and-pink bedroom and writes about ordinary teenage details, including a Farrah Fawcett haircut and a Gunny Sax dress, as well as sleeplessness and dreams of her mother returning. When her grandfather dies, she turns to Kate; in their letters, she is more nearly herself and less inclined to embellish. The correspondence makes friendship a continuing presence across distance, carrying everyday life and grief alike.

The road and the friendship

Kate’s later dream returns her to 1974, when she and Tully ride bikes at midnight. She remembers Firefly Lane as a winding strip of asphalt bordered by water-filled gullies and shaggy grass. Before the girls met, the road seemed to lead nowhere. Seen through their friendship, it becomes a place of shared possibility: the dark that once made the lane feel empty now holds the memory of the two girls together.

The remembered phrase “Let go, Katie. God hates a coward.” links the road to the daring and trust of their youth. When Kate dreams of the ride in the winter of her illness, she wakes in tears, unable to keep her memories at a distance. The return is not merely nostalgia; it shows the past pressing into the present as her time grows short.

Memory carried into illness

The decade’s language resurfaces in the friends’ later scenes together. During Kate’s final days, Tully pushes her wheelchair over uneven grass on Summer Hill and evokes their teenage rides, describing them as children again, laughing and believing themselves invincible. Kate feels the breeze and remembers Firefly Lane beside her best friend. At the end of the ride, she looks up at Tully with a smile that carries the recognition of their shared past; the starlight around them recalls fireflies.

Their conversation and laughter continue to draw on the era. When Kate produces a joint, Tully calls her a bogart, and the word sends them spiraling back to the seventies. They pass it between them, laughing, until Margie Mularkey arrives and teases them about thinking they are so cool. Margie joins the scene by recalling her own youth in the sixties and the girls sneaking out to ride their bikes. The past here is not sealed off as private memory: it becomes a family story that can be shared across generations.

A remembered world, not an escape

The 1970s also stand in contrast to the later pressures that shape the friends’ lives. The scrapbook records Tully’s early wish to make herself worthy of her mother’s pride; her letters to Kate gradually offer a more dependable place to tell the truth. Decades later, Kate’s dream of the bike ride and the friends’ joking recollections restore the intimacy of adolescence without undoing the losses and illness of the present. Memory cannot return them to childhood, but it can make their accumulated life together palpable when ordinary speech is not enough.

The novel’s final reflections on writing a life story sharpen this meaning. Kate writes that dates, names, and milestones are not what finally matter most to her; she remembers love, family, and laughter, and wants her children to know how proud she is of them and of herself. Against that retrospective understanding, the 1970s become not simply a time of youthful freedom but the beginning of relationships and memories that endure. The old lane remains meaningful because the friends made it meaningful together.