Jenny Mollen is breaking her silence after her split from Jason Biggs, reflecting on her past “loneliness” while trying to remain in the present.
“When you’re young and ambitious, or maybe just middle-aged with ADHD, it feels impossible to appreciate anything while you’re in it,” Mollen, 46, wrote in an essay on her “The Best Friend Experience Substack” on Monday, May 25. “The highest highs of my life have all hit like pennies disappearing into a bottomless well.”
She confessed, “I’d wait — maybe a moment or two for the sound of something landing, but before it ever did, I was on to the next. Hoping that the next thing would finally be the one that cured me — the one that made me feel worthy and validated in a way that has always evaded me.”
In the essay titled, “Don’t Tell Me What It Is,” Mollen recalled her sixth birthday party, which included a piñata, a clown and her mom sipping “Coors Light in the corner.”
This moment in time shaped her life — and is still lurking in her mind as she navigates her split from Biggs, 48, announced earlier this month. (Mollen and Biggs were married for 18 years before ultimately deciding to part ways.)
“I sat in the grass, next to the driveway, ripping through a pile of presents as the festivities raged around me,” Mollen wrote in the essay days before her 47th birthday on Saturday, May 30.
She remembered, “Later that night, I was overcome with this intense sense of disappointment and loneliness. Not because I didn’t get what I wanted, but because the best part of a gift is often wondering what’s inside. I rushed through the whole thing, trying to get all the answers and missing my own party.”
Mollen, who shares sons Sid, 12, and Lazlo, 8, with Biggs, admitted that she thinks about her sixth birthday “a lot,” since it taught her a lesson she said she has to “relearn over and over” about being present.
“I was in a rush to grow up, a rush to graduate college, a rush to land a TV show, and a billboard outside my ex-boyfriend’s apartment,” she recalled. “I refused to go out with people my own age because what would be the point? They were just as lost as I was, and frankly, not additive enough to the story.”
The Influenced actress, who married Biggs in 2008, explained that “everywhere I’ve ever been has felt a little temporary, like a waiting room I’m trapped in before an operation.”
That feeling has followed Mollen throughout her life, including her time spent raising her two sons alongside the American Pie actor.
“I thought I’d never survive the years when my children weren’t sleeping through the night. I thought every weekend would be spent trapped inside the hellscape of the Tribeca red park playground,” she revealed. “But those moments are behind me, and what’s tragic is that while I was in them, struggling to get out, my life was happening anyway. My kids were growing up, and I was standing in memories that I can now only access through pictures.”
Mollen noted that she leaves for Italy on Wednesday, May 27, “Which sounds soooo Eat, Pray, Love considering the current state of my life.”
However, Mollen said her purpose for the adventure has nothing to do with her divorce.
“I’m not going to find myself or sleep with some beautiful Italian stranger. I already have two half-Italians at home,” she wrote, referring to her boys. “I’m actually just going because a friend invited me to her birthday party. It also happens to be my birthday as well.”
She mused, “It’s unlikely I’ll see clowns, or Coors Light, or my mom getting buzzed in a corner, but if I come across a piñata, I absolutely intend on beating the s*** out of it.”
Mollen penned her reflective essay two weeks after Us Weekly confirmed on May 14 that she and Biggs had split. A rep for the estranged couple told Us at the time that they are separated but on “great terms” as they coparent their two children.
Biggs, for his part, has not publicly commented on their impending divorce.
