"Molly" by Blake Butler — Reviewed by Sarah Jordan
TW: Discussion of suicide
Reading Blake Butler’s latest, Molly (Archway Editions, 2023), is challenging. The paperback is more square than rectangle, and is thick—clocking in around 300 pages. The text itself is smaller than usual, dense on the page, and with narrow margins and zero paragraph breaks. The narrative is organized by intensely interconnected vignettes: most are a few pages, some quite short. There are a handful of color snapshots interspersed: photos of Molly that display moments in time from her childhood all the way through her wedding to Blake Butler to their last selfie in an art museum the weekend she died by suicide.
Aside from the physicality of reading Molly, the memoir is challenging because it is a narrative surrounded by death and suicide, ever-present on every single page. I would not recommend reading the entire memoir in 24 hours, as I did, and yet, Butler’s exacting prose is so compelling the story becomes difficult to turn away from. Understanding who Molly was through her own poetry and journals quoted in the memoir, and understanding who Molly was through Butler’s—at times—unreliable point of view, demands a reader’s undivided attention from page one.
Most folks encountering this memoir will likely know the general story: Molly Brodak was an astoundingly talented poet, teacher, and baker who died by suicide in early 2020. Her work was, to employ an overused publishing adjective, luminous—and from the outside, Molly was seemingly heading into a long and successful career. This perception was not Molly’s reality. Reading Molly highlights the gulf between how the world viewed her and how Molly Brodak viewed herself. Her sense of self, as her husband Butler describes it, was clearly distorted and made worse by mental illness and a family history of complex trauma. Butler works to offer his own perspective, and layers his point of view alongside a reconstruction of Molly’s own words, repurposed into a conversation about her life, her art, and their relationship.
The memoir opens with Butler’s recounting of the spring day when his wife, Molly, took her own life. These moments are sharp and painful, and rendered as such. He writes, “What if I never found her, I imagined, already able to imagine countless variations of the desolation just ahead; what life would be, in this hole, where space-time seemed stretched far beyond the point of breaking, no longer even scrolling forward, but just flapping, tearing skin off, empty space? I could already imagine it just like that—the nature of reality, comprised in violence so innate you don’t even need to find your loved one’s body to realize, with every passing moment, that you can’t go back, and that what’s ahead is little more than an endless and excruciating blur.”
Controversially, Butler includes Molly’s suicide note in full at the beginning of the memoir. There is an undeniable element of voyeurism here, but it becomes clear Butler feels including the note honors Molly’s legacy and the relationship. The note complicates her relationship to the reader, challenging us to consider her last wishes, her last confessions. And yet, including the note satisfies a morbid curiosity and establishes a transparency Butler will attempt to maintain for the remainder of the memoir. Following this stark and unsettling opening, Butler rewinds the tape to begin the story again at his initial meeting with his future wife, a wild and uniquely odd story of picking Molly up from a local jail; from there, he tells the story of their life together largely chronologically. He offers the facts of their relationship as he recalls them and fills in Molly’s point of view with quotes from her acclaimed memoir Bandit: A Daughter’s Memoir (Black Cat, 2016), her journals (read only after her death—a matter of trust, Butler stresses), and her poems, both published and unpublished. The resulting text appears at times kaleidoscopic as Butler and Brodak’s language intersects and contradicts. But then, contradiction seems to be a central theme in their relationship.
The tone occasionally becomes aggressive, and a reader might feel the urge to push back against Butler’s assumptions or declarations, especially as they relate to his own behavior. When describing his gambling, for instance, he writes, “I knew my limits very well, could stand up and walk away after a loss, though after a big one I might rant and rave for hours or smash things in my office. Molly simultaneously seemed to respect my process in this manner and to scorn it, as if the very fact that I had brakes at all was a point of privilege.” It is difficult to sympathize with Butler here, and one can’t help but wonder what Molly really thought. Butler later describes his drinking, “As usual, I took my rage out on myself. I was back to drinking heavily, now more than maybe ever, and mostly on my own at home, hating myself and how life was.” Again, the self-portrait opens space to consider the couple’s honesty or transparency in the moment. Yet, in her own words, Molly published an essay on the irony of her marriage to a gambling addict and insisted they were happy.
Butler makes explicit his concern for writing about the dead. His position is that Molly is his story to tell. At no point is he pretending to be the sole authority on Molly’s life or thoughts. Yet it is difficult to not think about the tension of ownership present here, especially given the title. His concern regarding the ethical questions faced with writing this particular kind of memoir are translated into the text by his offering of both his own and Molly’s contradicting narratives. He allows readers to see for themselves how differently Molly saw herself, and how ultimately this self-imposed exclusion leads her into a distorted reality and the end of her life. Despite winning a coveted 2018 NEA grant, Molly wasn’t having any luck placing her recent poetry collections with publishers. She was deeply discouraged: “No one liked her, she imagined, and even those who did must be dumb.” While watching her decline, Butler is honest about what he imagines he could have done differently, and he is just as honest about how his perception of Molly has changed since her death. The intense experiences of marriage and suicide are delicately paralleled in Butler’s telling, before being interrupted after 200 pages by his discovery of Molly’s infidelity. Butler is forced to reconcile this discovery with his love for Molly, and somewhere between forgiveness and anger, Butler settles for himself one simple truth: he loved Molly, but perhaps ultimately he did not know Molly.
Some of the best writing in Molly discusses the lived experience of trauma: “But trauma remains strange, rude in the face of such neat logic. Even as you learn to acclimate, as best you can, to what you’ve lived through, the floor of memory you’ve come to carry keeps on shifting, changing texture and direction, beyond anything like real control. You keep finding yourself standing next to some other version of who you were, trying both to listen and adjust to what you know, held in sync with how you feel.”
While Molly is a memoir devoted to Butler’s experiences of death and suicide, it is, in part, actually more concerned with a discussion of care and the ways in which people provide care for one another. Throughout the memoir, Butler and Molly are caught in a cycle: “How we hurt ourselves because we hurt, and we think that no one else could understand.” From the beginning Butler makes clear his desire to provide end of life care for his mother who first suffered as the sole caregiver to her husband before his death, and later through dementia and Alzheimer’s herself. The site of these experiences is Butler’s childhood home, further adding to the destabilizing of family dynamics. Butler renders his struggle with aging parents and their medical needs against his own struggles with alcohol, gambling, and suicidal idealization. This juxtaposition works well to establish something essential about Butler, about his ability to empathize. While describing the challenging methods of caring for individuals whom we love, Butler is asking us to consider how caring for another person’s mental or physical needs fundamentally alters that relationship dynamic.
Yet all of this is shattered after Molly’s death when Butler finds himself to be the object of care, care that is offered enthusiastically from his friends at a moment when he finds himself the most alone, without his wife or mother. In an instant, Butler’s position is flipped from caregiver to care-receiver. Though, at various points in the memoir, it might be clear to readers that Butler needs intensive care himself (particularly during his fraught search for a therapist), it is not until after Molly’s death that we see him ask for and receive meaningful support. Something about this reversal feels quietly triumphant, and further adds to the possibilities within the emphatic closing line: “The only way for me to complete this book is to live.”
If Molly succeeds at one thing it is as a timely representation of the complicated yet creative process of memorializing another person in print. Should we only remember one facet of a person’s life, ignoring the hugely messy reality of them? Do we have a right to read their private, unedited journals? Does Molly’s infidelity make her a “bad” person? Does her death by suicide seal her fate as a female poet? Butler asks these questions throughout Molly, but like many of us wrestling with similar tensions, does not receive any satisfying answer.
All we can do is live.