I Read the New Memoir Everyone Is Arguing About. It’s Astonishing.
Last week a new memoir with the simple title of Molly got a five-star review in the Telegraph and a rave in the Los Angeles Times. Unusually for a literary memoir published by a small press, Molly also got the aggregation treatment from the New York Post and the British tabloid the Daily Mail. “Famous poet Molly Brodak had a secret life as a ‘serial cheater’ who had affair with a student days after her wedding to author husband—and he only found out while preparing slideshow for her funeral after her suicide,” went the typically bloated, tell-it-all Mail headline.
Brodak appeared as a contestant on the short-lived third season of The Great American Baking Show, and she was beautiful—two facts that seem to have been enough, alongside the blindsided-cuckold angle, to interest the tabloids in a poet who, like every living poet other than Rupi Kaur, was not “famed.”
In the wake of Molly’s odd high-low initial media reception, a fellow writer described the book on X (Twitter) as “literary revenge porn against a mentally unwell woman who took her own life.” And thus the discourse was off, with everyone arguing about whether a husband has the right to publish a suicide note, texts, diary entries, or photos left behind by a wife.
The author of Molly, Blake Butler, described nonsensically by the Daily Mail as a “thriller author” but really a writer of high-minded surreal and weird literary fiction, seemed to have no problem defending himself against allegations of exploitation. After all, he wrote (among many other fiery things), “I … am very used to wading ass deep in the fuckshit of morons.” To those who were eager to judge the memoir, Butler had simple advice: “I recommend reading my book before forming an opinion of it from the tabloid media’s atrocious butchering of it based on web ephemera over which I have no control.”
Well, I have now read Molly. I get why postmortem publication of these kinds of secrets might give some people pause, but the book is so vital, so full of force, it’s a memorial most people would be happy to leave behind—the “bad” parts included. Molly guts the cliché description of someone with mental illness—“She was troubled”—right down its belly, showing exactly how that trouble presented, its sound and smell and taste, how it grew and receded and grew, how it left Molly profoundly isolated from her family, her friends, her husband, everything she loved. (“She seemed more alone than anyone I had ever met,” Butler writes.) It doesn’t pretend to know anything definitive about Molly at all—not-knowing is, in fact, part of its point. Butler is shattered at how he never really knew her. But he nonetheless describes her mind, and her ways of being, with such devoted attention that the book feels almost worshipful.
The memoir starts with the story of the day Molly died by suicide—a chapter published by the Paris Review earlier this year, which includes the description of the note Molly left on their front door for Blake to find—then goes back to the beginning, detailing the couple’s first interactions; their start-and-stop courtship, marked by infidelity and drama on both sides; their decision to commit to each other; and their half decade of domestic life, in a house in Atlanta with chickens in the backyard. The book’s pages are dotted with photos from their smartphones: Blake and Molly eating out during their “take LSD and go have dinner” phase; Molly flipping Blake the bird, ensconced in a group of friends at a restaurant table; Molly holding two of their hens; an absolutely stunning gothic masterpiece Molly baked in response to a friend’s prompt to make a cake that would look like an “octopus eating flowers.” “Our daily homelife as a couple—despite the hard times—was full of joy,” Butler writes.
In an early passage, as if reminding himself how much she was capable of feeling, Butler lists Molly’s artistic heroes: Herman Melville, Paolo Uccello, Anne Carson, Jean-Luc Godard, Agnes Martin, Lou Barlow, Steve Albini, more. This dense, packed passage goes on for three pages, cataloging Molly’s enthusiasms: films “strange and dark” but also “uncanny and absurd”; sentimental music she’d put on “just to make herself cry”; everything natural, “trees and rocks and weather and the sea”; but also a YouTube video of a “cat being scolded for hiding in a Christmas tree.” In a separate paragraph, Butler describes the treats Molly would invent, early in their relationship, and bring to his house in a Tupperware: “Root beer float cookies, pineapple cookies with orange glace, banana fudge blondies, apricot custard hand pies, blood orange Oreos dipped in vanilla bean white choc.”
But, Butler writes, for Molly, none of these enthusiasms could be purely, uncomplicatedly enjoyed: “There always had to be a bitter pill, a tarnish to the silver, already there or soon to come.” When her season of Great American Baking Show got canceled after one episode (judge Johnny Iuzzini got #MeToo’d), it only proved to Molly that nothing good could ever exist and she didn’t deserve it anyway. Molly had made it all the way to the finale, one of three finalists, but nobody would ever see those episodes. “What a fool she’d been to waste her life on such an idiotic lark, this reconfirmed,” Butler writes. “Not only was she a leech for having wished to be on TV, all her efforts had been thrown out, like proper trash.”
Butler is honest about how difficult it could be to live with Molly. One rift stems from their wildly different childhoods: his, conventional, secure, happy; hers, neglectful, full of loss and uncertainty. (Brodak’s New York Times obituary was framed around the story told in her own critically acclaimed memoir, Bandit, which is about growing up with her unpredictable, emotionally abusive bank-robber father.) Close to the time of Molly’s death, Butler’s mother gets dementia, then dies, suddenly, two weeks after a diagnosis of ovarian cancer. Molly can’t step up, Butler writes—not in blunt words like those, but that’s the message.
In the aftermath of his mother’s death, Molly’s mother comes to visit and tries to “help” his grieving process through some kind of vibes-based meditation. He absolutely refuses, and Molly becomes furious at him, his implied comparison between his (loving, dead) mother and her (insensitive, never-enough, but still-alive) mother too much for her to take. “You’re such a selfish piece of shit,” she yells at him. As he grieves, and prepares his mom’s house for sale, she doesn’t like him bringing home knickknacks and baby toys from his childhood home. “Each of these relics, I slowly began to realize, as felt through Molly’s eyes, only served to reinforce the attention she’d never had,” Butler writes, “and therefore provided a good reason to despise me where it hurt most.”
This break between the two of them is so painful it puts news of her affairs, which is what the Mail and the Post care about, in sharp perspective. The details of her unfaithfulness come two-thirds of the way into the memoir, when Butler finds partially undressed selfies and nudes he had never seen in her phone, and reciprocal photos sent of men. He finds emails, discovers a hidden drawer of sex toys, looks up Facebook profiles. He locates one particular man she’d been with most steadily and recently, and speaks with him on the phone. “She’d baited him by explaining how I never pay attention to her, how I’m lazy and I’m rude, how we act like roommates, grown apart—just the way she’d described her prior husband many times to me,” he writes. Worst of all are the emails he finds between Molly and her writing students, detailing escalations of out-of-class interactions that evolve into affairs.
There was a lot of undestroyed evidence, he thinks to himself, “as if she wanted to be caught, and maybe even understood.” Nevertheless, he agonizes, “should I be allowed to make this said? To bring to light a part of Molly’s story she covered over at any cost?”
I don’t know. It’d be one thing to reprint such evidence randomly, without context. It feels like quite another to embed it in a book that contains so much other evidence, such careful observation, and such loving attention. Her infidelity hurts Butler, as does living with the emotional whiplash of her up-and-down moods. (In a section of the book, and in an interview published this week after last week’s online dust-up, he goes so far as to describe the effect on him as “abuse.”) But so does the evidence of the things she did only to herself. Describing a point of creative stasis in Molly’s writing life, Butler includes a list she wrote, titled “Master List of Things I Like and Might Write About.” She’s systematically redacted more than half of the Things, for reasons unknown. Moss and ferns and sugar and water birds and cherries and “the sound of a room full of people typing,” all struck through as one.
On their honeymoon, they ride horses on a beach. In that section of the book, there’s a photo of her on horseback, turning around, looking back at him, face filled with joy. He ends the chapter with a line from one of her last poems, “Horse and Cart”: “I can’t even imagine a horse / anymore. / That we sat on their spines / and yanked their mouths around.”
Could there be a more fitting tribute to a person—especially to a writer—than seeing that connection, light and dark, and putting it all down on paper? I’d urge anyone upset about the idea of this gorgeous, sad memoir—as I admit I was at first—to read the book. You certainly can’t be more upset that this book exists than Butler himself is. He writes that he has tried to accept that “chaos felt more like home to her than happiness,” that “her higher highs could only fund the lower lows, continuously preserving her grim worldview with the idea that anything not rotten to its core must be a lie.” And then he adds: “But how about you go ahead and try and get that through your head about your partner, the central pinion in your life?”
