Molly by Blake Butler

An extraordinary memoir of grief and discovery

This week, Blake Butler’s Molly comes out from Archway Editions, and I suggest you get a copy. The summary: Three years into Blake and Molly’s marriage, after finishing a run, Blake finds a note from Molly telling him that she has ended her life. He runs through the woods, hoping to prevent her from going through with the suicide, and finds her dead body. This is the just the start of the memoir, and what follows is Butler attempting to tell the story of their relationship, the story of Molly’s life, and what he discovers after her death.

I hate that I have to say this: If you don’t want to know about what happens in the book, stop reading now and order it.

Molly Brodak grew up in a dysfunctional family. To pay off gambling debts, her father robbed banks and went to prison. Brodak felt as though her mentally-ill parents never properly paid attention to her. She published poetry and Bandit, a memoir, and taught creative writing. She got married and divorced and became an accomplished amateur baker, appearing in the first two episodes of season 3 of the American version of Bake Off, which got cancelled following sexual assaults accusations against one of the host. Butler fills in most of her biography, which all double as reasons for her worthlessness, failed plots, reasons for rejection, etc… For every accomplishment, Brodak felt unseen, unworthy, alone. She had the typical failures of any writer, but her sense of shame seemed somehow greater, more important, more victimized. Butler pushed against this narrative, attempting, as we all do, to highlight the greatness of those we love who have trouble seeing why it is we love them.

Butler loved Brodak. You feel his devotion to her throughout the memoir. Not only to her, but to his ailing parents, both of whom get sick and die of dementia-like diseases. He takes care of them. He deals with their affairs. Butler lives his life in these pages as a caretaker. Part of this book’s project is the detailing and dedication to his dead family, eulogizing them in the most vital way a writer can: creating living versions of the death. To put in simply: immortalizing complex people in the way we know how.

The relationship between Butler and Brodak seemed to be one of the most meaningful aspects of Brodak’s life, although as you read the book, something feels fundamentally off. Butler tells stories of their arguments, secrets, betrayals, and the reader senses something like a lie being told. Not by Butler, but by Brodak, who exhibits signs of manipulation, gaslighting, abuse that seem to get brushed over by Butler. You get the sense that Brodak’s harsh upbringing has given her manipulative capabilities that Butler doesn’t seem to fully understand. This really is the feeling of the book, of sensing and seeming, of a writer revealing the details of a narrative that has eluded them.

However, following Molly Brodak’s death, Butler discovers what had she had been hiding from him. Many affairs. Not only with random men, but with her college students who she had, in his words, groomed. If he had been struggling to understand the reasons for her suicide, the potential reasons keep adding up following her death. She leaves a digital trail of many of her abuses, and Butler must learn how to incorporate the knowledge that he had been abused by Brodak, the person he loved most in the world, who herself had been forced to live a difficult life. The reader’s sense becomes fact. His grief is a complex grief, and his memoir is a complex memoir.

Molly is an account of a man learning that he had been a victim of abuse by the love of his life. Molly is a deeply loving account of an intelligent victim who had been many more things than Butler had known. Abused and an abuser. A deceptive, straight shooter. A deeply ashamed person who never seemed to be known by another person until after she died, even though Butler had been trying to know her, as she had wanted to be known, in only as much as she had only let him her. The memoir is fascinating, sad, moving, and the narrative structure permits the multiplicity of feeling and knowledge that Butler himself went through in his relationship, grief, and processing. An unforgettable work of beauty and consciousness and recovery and love.