After starting work in Desmond’s factory at the age of fifteen, Molloy entered the Missionary Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate Conception near Mullingar, County Westmeath, when she was seventeen years old. Apart from her own fictionalized accounts of her time in the convent, there is no record of her life during this period, but her husband, Gerard Brady, stated in an interview that she “…thought that she was getting away there, she thought at the time she was opening up, getting away from this very narrow world [in the North].” Through Monica Baldwin’s I Leap Over the Wall, Karen Armstrong’s Through the Narrow Gate: A Memoir of Spiritual Discovery, and Camillus Metcalfe’s For God’s Sake: The Hidden Lives of Irish Nuns, we see that Molloy’s fictionalized accounts cover the same set of experiences as these non-fictional texts. After leaving the convent, Molloy returned home and subsequently suffered a nervous breakdown. She received electroconvulsive therapy in Gransha Hospital, a mental asylum in Derry.