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Molly
A gripping, unforgettable memoir from one of the best, most original writers of the 21st century.
Blake Butler and Molly Brodak instantly connected, fell in love, married and built a life together. Both writers with deep roots in contemporary American literature, their union was an iconic joining of forces between two major and beloved talents.
Nearly three years into their marriage, grappling with mental illness and a lifetime of trauma, Molly took her own life. In the days and weeks after Molly’s death, Blake discovered shocking secrets she had held back from the world, fundamentally altering his view of their relationship and who she was.
A masterpiece of autobiography, Molly is a riveting journey into the darkest and most unthinkable parts of the human heart, emerging with a hard-won, unsurpassedly beautiful understanding that expands the possibilities of language to comprehend and express true love.
Unrelentingly clear, honest and concise, Molly approaches the impossible directly, with a total empathy that has no parallel or precedent. A supremely important work that will be taught, loved, relied on and passed around for years to come, Blake Butler affirms now beyond question his position at the very top rank of writers.
Blake Butler and Molly Brodak instantly connected, fell in love, married and built a life together. Both writers with deep roots in contemporary American literature, their union was an iconic joining of forces between two major and beloved talents.
Nearly three years into their marriage, grappling with mental illness and a lifetime of trauma, Molly took her own life. In the days and weeks after Molly’s death, Blake discovered shocking secrets she had held back from the world, fundamentally altering his view of their relationship and who she was.
A masterpiece of autobiography, Molly is a riveting journey into the darkest and most unthinkable parts of the human heart, emerging with a hard-won, unsurpassedly beautiful understanding that expands the possibilities of language to comprehend and express true love.
Unrelentingly clear, honest and concise, Molly approaches the impossible directly, with a total empathy that has no parallel or precedent. A supremely important work that will be taught, loved, relied on and passed around for years to come, Blake Butler affirms now beyond question his position at the very top rank of writers.
320 pages, Paperback
First published December 5, 2023
About the author
Blake Butler
67 books402 followersBlake Butler is the author of EVER, Scorch Atlas, and two books forthcoming in 2011 and 2012 from Harper Perennial. He edits 'the internet literature magazine blog of the future' HTML Giant. His other writing have appeared in The Believer, Unsaid, Fence, Dzanc's Best of the Web 2009. He lives in Atlanta.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 511 reviews
August 18, 2023
TW: suicide + suicidal ideation
A few months ago, my partner came home from work and said, “Wanna read a book about some guy whose wife killed herself?”
“Is it any good?” I said.
They shrugged. My partner had requested an ARC of “Molly” because they like Archway Editions, and the book seemed interesting. Neither of us had heard of Butler, but my partner offered to pass the ARC along to me.
I was lying on the couch, where I spent most of my days save for brief trips to the kitchen and the bathroom when absolutely necessary. I was the most depressed I had ever been in my life, and my partner and I were suffering through it together. I tried to drag them into the orbit of my own self-hatred, as their love for me was an affront to my own wretchedness, the only thing that felt real and true. I had given up on myself, and wanted them to give up on me. In fact, in my worst moments I viewed my relationship with them, like all of my relationships, as an inconvenience, because they would not allow me to die. My partner was more desperate for my recovery than I was. From my depressive haze, it seemed like my partner, familiar with the growing seriousness of my own suicidal ideations, recommended Molly with an ulterior motive, one I bristled at. Nevertheless, I gave Molly a try.
Molly was beautiful, it was brutal, it was brilliant, you should read it. I cried my way through it, reading the whole thing in a single sitting, then I read it again a couple of months later. It was jarring to see the experience of loving someone who is mired so deeply in her own self-hatred reflected back at me. So much of Molly’s behavior emerges from a desire to confirm that the worst of her is true, or to numb her ruthless internal monologue with a new flirtation or a lie or a joke. The most heartbreaking parts of the book are when Molly turns her self-castigating voice outwards, especially at Blake. Most heartbreaking of all is when Blake internalizes it.
I’d hate to portray this book as cloying or diaristic when it is anything but. Blake writes about Molly with what I can only describe as unsparing attention. He presents Molly’s obsessions, dreams, flaws, flights of fancy, artistic ambitions, insecurities, and traumas without attempting to reconcile her contradictions, much less his own. As the book got gnarlier, and Molly’s behavior got more harrowing and nasty, I found myself longing for a comforting authorial bang of the gavel, assurance that Molly was gaslighting or manipulative even abusive. But these assurances never came. I think the book is better for it.
Molly is also a strange book. It has these opaque, lyrical passages, as if a supernatural force is slithering somewhere beneath the surface of the prose. It gives a mythic significance to the betrayals of everyday life. Never have I cried so much about someone quitting Skyrim or the cancellation of the Great American Baking Show.
I went back and forth about whether or not to mention myself in my review of “Molly,” or whether to review it at all. I’m wary of a kind of depressive narcissism that transforms all art into self-help. A lot of people respond to art about mental health or suicide with their own stories, a tendency I find endearing, embarrassing, and kind of distasteful, depending on the day. I suppose artists are moved by seeing the impacts of their work firsthand, even in these clumsy, nakedly sincere ways. On the other hand, it also seems overwhelming to be confronted with, to put it most uncharitably, so much trauma dumping.
But here I am, a rando making a Goodreads account to write a too-long, too-personal review of this book months before it comes out and there will be other, saner reviews that can bury it. “Molly” was a gift. Blake’s insistence on Molly’s complexity, and refusal to slot her into some convenient, totalizing narrative is the ultimate refusal of her distorted all-or-nothing logic, an act of love that’s rigorous and unsentimental, but deeply kind. True love is a place where you cannot hide. I wish Molly didn’t feel like she had to hide, and I wish I didn’t, either. This book gave me a bit more strength to try to let myself be seen.
A few months ago, my partner came home from work and said, “Wanna read a book about some guy whose wife killed herself?”
“Is it any good?” I said.
They shrugged. My partner had requested an ARC of “Molly” because they like Archway Editions, and the book seemed interesting. Neither of us had heard of Butler, but my partner offered to pass the ARC along to me.
I was lying on the couch, where I spent most of my days save for brief trips to the kitchen and the bathroom when absolutely necessary. I was the most depressed I had ever been in my life, and my partner and I were suffering through it together. I tried to drag them into the orbit of my own self-hatred, as their love for me was an affront to my own wretchedness, the only thing that felt real and true. I had given up on myself, and wanted them to give up on me. In fact, in my worst moments I viewed my relationship with them, like all of my relationships, as an inconvenience, because they would not allow me to die. My partner was more desperate for my recovery than I was. From my depressive haze, it seemed like my partner, familiar with the growing seriousness of my own suicidal ideations, recommended Molly with an ulterior motive, one I bristled at. Nevertheless, I gave Molly a try.
Molly was beautiful, it was brutal, it was brilliant, you should read it. I cried my way through it, reading the whole thing in a single sitting, then I read it again a couple of months later. It was jarring to see the experience of loving someone who is mired so deeply in her own self-hatred reflected back at me. So much of Molly’s behavior emerges from a desire to confirm that the worst of her is true, or to numb her ruthless internal monologue with a new flirtation or a lie or a joke. The most heartbreaking parts of the book are when Molly turns her self-castigating voice outwards, especially at Blake. Most heartbreaking of all is when Blake internalizes it.
I’d hate to portray this book as cloying or diaristic when it is anything but. Blake writes about Molly with what I can only describe as unsparing attention. He presents Molly’s obsessions, dreams, flaws, flights of fancy, artistic ambitions, insecurities, and traumas without attempting to reconcile her contradictions, much less his own. As the book got gnarlier, and Molly’s behavior got more harrowing and nasty, I found myself longing for a comforting authorial bang of the gavel, assurance that Molly was gaslighting or manipulative even abusive. But these assurances never came. I think the book is better for it.
Molly is also a strange book. It has these opaque, lyrical passages, as if a supernatural force is slithering somewhere beneath the surface of the prose. It gives a mythic significance to the betrayals of everyday life. Never have I cried so much about someone quitting Skyrim or the cancellation of the Great American Baking Show.
I went back and forth about whether or not to mention myself in my review of “Molly,” or whether to review it at all. I’m wary of a kind of depressive narcissism that transforms all art into self-help. A lot of people respond to art about mental health or suicide with their own stories, a tendency I find endearing, embarrassing, and kind of distasteful, depending on the day. I suppose artists are moved by seeing the impacts of their work firsthand, even in these clumsy, nakedly sincere ways. On the other hand, it also seems overwhelming to be confronted with, to put it most uncharitably, so much trauma dumping.
But here I am, a rando making a Goodreads account to write a too-long, too-personal review of this book months before it comes out and there will be other, saner reviews that can bury it. “Molly” was a gift. Blake’s insistence on Molly’s complexity, and refusal to slot her into some convenient, totalizing narrative is the ultimate refusal of her distorted all-or-nothing logic, an act of love that’s rigorous and unsentimental, but deeply kind. True love is a place where you cannot hide. I wish Molly didn’t feel like she had to hide, and I wish I didn’t, either. This book gave me a bit more strength to try to let myself be seen.
February 18, 2024
A long winded “am I the asshole” Reddit post.
December 27, 2023
Before we begin: yes, I actually read the book! I’m not one of Blake Butler’s illiterate “haters” that he loves compulsively posting about on Twitter!
I really don’t know what’s worse: a hateful and spiteful book written by a man who wanted to hurt his already dead wife one final time or the fact that he loves to go on rants on Twitter while his new (yes, new!) writer wife posts outrageously violent and misogynistic shit about a fellow woman writer who who expressed her displeasure towards the book and its publication.
Are we all really doing this for the sake of art? Or is it just a bunch of obnoxious indie lit darlings having meltdowns on their Twitters and Substacks? Is this book truly a literary example of looking at grief in the face and being brave enough to write it down? Or is it just an excuse for a man to reveal, in detail, his dead wife’s sexual desires and shameful acts because he was upset that she cheated on him numerous times with her students and this dude who was, according to Blake, a TOTAL loser who was definitely jealous of him?
Blake loves to talk about how little he knew about Molly while simultaneously being the only person who knew her. He constantly projects onto her, misunderstands, and miscalculates, until it’s convenient for him to be the only one who understands her.
The best parts of the book were when he was quoting Molly, taking bits from her own writing. Blake never missed an opportunity to use her words to underwrite his entire project.
I really don’t know what’s worse: a hateful and spiteful book written by a man who wanted to hurt his already dead wife one final time or the fact that he loves to go on rants on Twitter while his new (yes, new!) writer wife posts outrageously violent and misogynistic shit about a fellow woman writer who who expressed her displeasure towards the book and its publication.
Are we all really doing this for the sake of art? Or is it just a bunch of obnoxious indie lit darlings having meltdowns on their Twitters and Substacks? Is this book truly a literary example of looking at grief in the face and being brave enough to write it down? Or is it just an excuse for a man to reveal, in detail, his dead wife’s sexual desires and shameful acts because he was upset that she cheated on him numerous times with her students and this dude who was, according to Blake, a TOTAL loser who was definitely jealous of him?
Blake loves to talk about how little he knew about Molly while simultaneously being the only person who knew her. He constantly projects onto her, misunderstands, and miscalculates, until it’s convenient for him to be the only one who understands her.
The best parts of the book were when he was quoting Molly, taking bits from her own writing. Blake never missed an opportunity to use her words to underwrite his entire project.
July 2, 2024
Butler's controversial memoir about the suicide of his first wife Molly Brodak led to a rather outraged discussion whether it's valid to write about how a mentally ill person who took her own life pushed her loved ones to the psychological limit - and bless all those self-righteous people who think they take the moral high ground by condemning the author, you very obviously didn't spend years of your life trying to take care of a psychologically disturbed family member. The thing is: It's a taboo to talk about how the sickness of a loved one can destroy their caretakers, especially when these caretakers deeply love the afflicted person. And it's a common occurrence: Many people who tend to seriously (physically or mentally) ill family members over a longer period of time develop illnesses themselves, due to exhaustion, and, yes, moral pressure: "How dare you complain, you're not the one being sick!" They have to suffer in silence, or they are declared to be bad people.
And that's what at the root of the conversation here: Butler tries to understand Molly's mental disposition, which was likely bipolar disorder, he tries to get to terms with their toxic dynamic, and with the things he discovers about his dead wife after she shot herself. He aims to construct explanations related to her childhood, which is, of course, futile kitchen psychology, he will never truly know. At the same time, he loses both of his parents to dementia. It's pretty hard to maintain that this book is literary revenge, because Butler himself looks pretty bad in the text: Unfaithfulness, lots of alcohol, general edgelordery, problems with personal borders, a temper, giving a ton of psychedelic drugs to a mentally ill woman, the list goes on.
The dynamic between Molly and Butler is so toxic, you don't even know where to begin. But this is not the source of Molly's problems: Trying to find some kind of transactional cause-and-effect relation means blaming Butler for Molly's bipolar disorder, but the disorder adds to the situation, the illness itself is not Butler's fault. And there are limits to what Butler can do about it. Let that sink in, and ponder what that degree of helplessness means for him. The illness also doesn't take all personal responsibilty from Molly, she still has agency. The problems of course lie in determing where, when and how the illness affects her agency.
So is Blake Butler a great guy? Who knows, the rendition he shows us in the novel is a flawed guy struggling to be a husband to Molly, who herself struggles to be a wife. What's hard to maintain is that he is here to demean a dead person. The text has plenty of contra-arguments, and it's important to let family members of ill people talk without judging them so harshly and self-righteously. Also, the whole thing is very well-written, especially the beginning which takes us along when Butler discovers the body: It's devastating to read.
And that's what at the root of the conversation here: Butler tries to understand Molly's mental disposition, which was likely bipolar disorder, he tries to get to terms with their toxic dynamic, and with the things he discovers about his dead wife after she shot herself. He aims to construct explanations related to her childhood, which is, of course, futile kitchen psychology, he will never truly know. At the same time, he loses both of his parents to dementia. It's pretty hard to maintain that this book is literary revenge, because Butler himself looks pretty bad in the text: Unfaithfulness, lots of alcohol, general edgelordery, problems with personal borders, a temper, giving a ton of psychedelic drugs to a mentally ill woman, the list goes on.
The dynamic between Molly and Butler is so toxic, you don't even know where to begin. But this is not the source of Molly's problems: Trying to find some kind of transactional cause-and-effect relation means blaming Butler for Molly's bipolar disorder, but the disorder adds to the situation, the illness itself is not Butler's fault. And there are limits to what Butler can do about it. Let that sink in, and ponder what that degree of helplessness means for him. The illness also doesn't take all personal responsibilty from Molly, she still has agency. The problems of course lie in determing where, when and how the illness affects her agency.
So is Blake Butler a great guy? Who knows, the rendition he shows us in the novel is a flawed guy struggling to be a husband to Molly, who herself struggles to be a wife. What's hard to maintain is that he is here to demean a dead person. The text has plenty of contra-arguments, and it's important to let family members of ill people talk without judging them so harshly and self-righteously. Also, the whole thing is very well-written, especially the beginning which takes us along when Butler discovers the body: It's devastating to read.
January 27, 2024
There are some beautiful, tender moments in this book. I respect why the author felt the need to write it. I really don’t think he had a right to share Molly’s old journal entries. But my biggest lingering thought: did a SINGLE editor touch this book at any point?
Read
December 17, 2023After reading many reviews of Molly, I began wondering if I was reading the same book as everyone else. I began to wonder why this book needed to be written, why did Molly's story need to be told, other than what appears to be a payback, an 'I'll show you, I'll show the world who you really were', one final assault on her. The irony here for me is that throughout her life, her mental anguish, torment and pain at the hands of others as well as her own, it would be Blake who would ultimately betray her to the whole world. He has every right to be angry, confused and deeply hurt upon the discovery of her lies and cheating. I can't imagine the mental toll and torment of such a discovery after a partner's death, questioning every aspect of their lives together, trying to distinguish between what was real and what were lies, especially as she is no longer here for him to face her, question her, be angry with her. He will never get the answers he is so desperate for. However, to expose all those personal and quite graphic details of her betrayal, I feel were completely unnecessary, hurtful and extremely damaging to her memory. Will Molly be remembered as a gifted poet and writer, or will she now forever be known as Molly, the Liar, the Cheater, the Narcissist, and
I'm starting to wonder if maybe, just maybe that was the intention all along.
I'm starting to wonder if maybe, just maybe that was the intention all along.
July 19, 2024
an intimately dense and sensitively spiked body of work that makes the reader turn over the possibilities of could have/would have/should have in retrospect. the emotionally barbed relationship, like vines wrapping trees in spiritual restraint, takes quite a toll on the reader, while the author accepts his demons and discovers that truth can be stranger than fiction. deep, dark and insightful.
May 19, 2024
BookPrize read for 2024 Octofinals in Non-fiction. Did not make it beyond this first round. It came in last on my six read.
Oh my. Not sure what I can say about this book. For the most part I could appreciate the author's sentiments but the writing was like a tangled ball of string. There were only scattered moments when a clear line was pulled out.
This is a memoir written about his wife's suicide and the author's attempt to understand it. Their courtship/marriage is examined at length along with personal backgrounds and writings without any clear answers. I would say he circles around his feelings and their history without any clarity or closure. The writing is difficult at best and too often just lots and lots of "word salad" without any beginning and end just more words thrown at it hoping to get a point across. There were occasional sentences of that hit the mark well but too few for this reader.
Oh my. Not sure what I can say about this book. For the most part I could appreciate the author's sentiments but the writing was like a tangled ball of string. There were only scattered moments when a clear line was pulled out.
This is a memoir written about his wife's suicide and the author's attempt to understand it. Their courtship/marriage is examined at length along with personal backgrounds and writings without any clear answers. I would say he circles around his feelings and their history without any clarity or closure. The writing is difficult at best and too often just lots and lots of "word salad" without any beginning and end just more words thrown at it hoping to get a point across. There were occasional sentences of that hit the mark well but too few for this reader.
January 11, 2024
A polarizing memoir that left me feeling very uncomfortable and questioning if the author, Blake, had the authority to write about his dead wife in such graphic detail without consent. His wife, Molly, suffered from mental illness before ultimately ending her life after years of struggles. Although Blake also told details of his life/story, expressed much love and gratitude for his late wife Molly, and used excerpts from her book, “Bandit”, as to use her own words, he included intimate details about his wife that felt exploitative. The book was well written, but I would not recommend it to others.
December 20, 2023
Needed a better proofreader. I wish Butler had shown us more reasons why he loved Molly, more of her redeeming attributes, because I left this book with the feeling that she was cruel, manipulative, and callous, and that he was a victim of abuse to an extent he had yet to fully realize from even beyond the grave. Very hard to rate/view this from a critical lens as it is so deeply personal
July 15, 2023
This is one of the most beautiful, wounded, sincere and loving things I've ever read.
I can't imagine how difficult it was to offer your departed loved one to the judgement of strangers with all her qualities, but also all her flaws and wounds and yet despite being quite wounded himself, Blake Butler stands behind Molly without any fear or reservation. His love is stronger than the demons that pushed his wife to end her life. Being a long-time Blake Butler fan, I can appreciate how much courage it must've taken to abandon momentarily his stream-of-consciousness writing style and be so unflinchingly present in order to honor his late wife.
Molly is the best thing he's ever written alongside 300 000 000 and that says a lot because the guy is really freaking good. These two book are also inextricably linked.
I can't imagine how difficult it was to offer your departed loved one to the judgement of strangers with all her qualities, but also all her flaws and wounds and yet despite being quite wounded himself, Blake Butler stands behind Molly without any fear or reservation. His love is stronger than the demons that pushed his wife to end her life. Being a long-time Blake Butler fan, I can appreciate how much courage it must've taken to abandon momentarily his stream-of-consciousness writing style and be so unflinchingly present in order to honor his late wife.
Molly is the best thing he's ever written alongside 300 000 000 and that says a lot because the guy is really freaking good. These two book are also inextricably linked.
February 24, 2024
god awful under-edited book that i regret buying. blake butler isn’t a writer, he just regurgitates better things that he’s read. the only good parts of this book were when he quotes his dead wife.
December 9, 2023
I travel across two freeways everyday and, on occasion, imagine what it would be like to be obliterated by a head-on collision with an Anthem Axle Back mack truck. If this is how you die then your brief life takes on a special significance. Everything you have ever done has led you to the moment where your body was vaporized by getting a little too close to the global supply chain in motion. This is what happens with any untimely death: heart attacks, random acts of violence, suicides. They recontextualize and paraphrase an entire life. I don't necessarily want to wade into the (frankly disappointing) twitter discourse around this book because I don't think it is constructive. I believe that in marriage certain aspects of private lives merge and Molly's story in many ways is Blake's story, and Blake's story about how little a person can really know another person is also Molly's. The ethics of, say, publishing a suicide note, or "receipts" of infidelity, are perhaps shaky but that doesn't make a book bad. I, an apologist of Knausgaard, think the honesty of Blake's project here to be quite moving.
I do not like the prose, however, and must harden my heart to say: this needed a harsher editor. Comma splicing on every page, abusing the em dash, some occasionally tortured syntax, and at least one typo to boot. Examples of free indirect speech on every page, which in short bursts can give the impression of flexibility but when overused leaves the whole thing feeling a bit too elastic. Bad similes on nearly every page, belabouring and more often than not obscuring whatever heft there was to the declarative phrase. Imprecision in about half of the metaphorical language. A structure with tabloid-style "you won't believe what I found out later" tidbits which produces a kind of emotional falseness in the text.
Writing about grief is one of the harder things to write about. Most of us are reduced to cliche in the face of the unknowable. I give credit where it is due and the book is "brave", and I'm sure it was quite therapeutic for Blake Butler to get this out there (though I do suggest he get off twitter)
I do not like the prose, however, and must harden my heart to say: this needed a harsher editor. Comma splicing on every page, abusing the em dash, some occasionally tortured syntax, and at least one typo to boot. Examples of free indirect speech on every page, which in short bursts can give the impression of flexibility but when overused leaves the whole thing feeling a bit too elastic. Bad similes on nearly every page, belabouring and more often than not obscuring whatever heft there was to the declarative phrase. Imprecision in about half of the metaphorical language. A structure with tabloid-style "you won't believe what I found out later" tidbits which produces a kind of emotional falseness in the text.
Writing about grief is one of the harder things to write about. Most of us are reduced to cliche in the face of the unknowable. I give credit where it is due and the book is "brave", and I'm sure it was quite therapeutic for Blake Butler to get this out there (though I do suggest he get off twitter)
December 7, 2023
This is beautifully written and impressively descriptive.
I found myself uncomfortable with the book even as I admired its writing. While the book is an autobiography, the author’s wife Molly ultimately remains the subject most laid bare by it. The inclusion of Molly’s suicide note was startling & made even more so by Butler’s dismissal of it as an inauthentic last work from Molly, among other reasons because she didn’t mention in it that she had been cheating on Butler. This portrayal of her last words felt tinged with bitterness, even if it is justifiable.
As a reader I felt that even mediated by the author’s clear love and affection for her, Molly becomes a villain— a complex villain, but a villain nonetheless. And she is dead now, so this becomes her legacy and her final portrait, not her poetry or her own writing, but the exhaustive description of the pain she inflicted upon herself and the author. Is this fair?
The best art is challenging. This book is no doubt a work of great artistic value, and I’m glad the author was able to process his grief through its creation. But its existence is also morally complex— to exhume someone’s worst deceptions, to show a suicide note then dismiss it, to reveal sexts sent by Molly that were never meant to meant to be seen by the author, let alone thousands of readers—that is something I’m grappling with despite my appreciation for the book’s artistic merit.
I found myself uncomfortable with the book even as I admired its writing. While the book is an autobiography, the author’s wife Molly ultimately remains the subject most laid bare by it. The inclusion of Molly’s suicide note was startling & made even more so by Butler’s dismissal of it as an inauthentic last work from Molly, among other reasons because she didn’t mention in it that she had been cheating on Butler. This portrayal of her last words felt tinged with bitterness, even if it is justifiable.
As a reader I felt that even mediated by the author’s clear love and affection for her, Molly becomes a villain— a complex villain, but a villain nonetheless. And she is dead now, so this becomes her legacy and her final portrait, not her poetry or her own writing, but the exhaustive description of the pain she inflicted upon herself and the author. Is this fair?
The best art is challenging. This book is no doubt a work of great artistic value, and I’m glad the author was able to process his grief through its creation. But its existence is also morally complex— to exhume someone’s worst deceptions, to show a suicide note then dismiss it, to reveal sexts sent by Molly that were never meant to meant to be seen by the author, let alone thousands of readers—that is something I’m grappling with despite my appreciation for the book’s artistic merit.
January 11, 2024
Blake Butler smeared his traumatized wife as a nutcase and has constructed his “narrative” from a mishmash of self-delusion, theft, censorship, and selective exposure of the marriage he purports to “illuminate”. His wife left behind a suicide note, which did NOT permit her husband to use her phone, journals, etc. for any of his future “writing” projects. His own phone, unpublished writing, etc. are unavailable for us to examine. And, he’s shut down replies from EVERYONE, including his followers, in tweets he’s posted that complain about HIS “victimization” by people (Daily Mail, friends of Molly Brodak, outraged readers, incredulous booksellers, etc.) who have held him accountable. Most damning of all may be his insistence that he “loves” this woman, whose agency he has violated, whose character he has impugned, and whose family of choice he has trolled. Mr. Butler is the D-list literary version of Johnny Depp.
February 22, 2024
DNF at page 150 because I truly felt I was contributing to abuse against a dead woman who had already suffered enough in life. I don't know who Blake Butler is, but I love Molly Brodak's poetry, which is why I decided to give this one a shot. Not only is this book bitter, exploitative emotional revenge porn, it's also poorly written and seemingly completely unedited? Full of typos, run-on sentences, paragraphs of word salad. It's not even about Molly as a human being outside of her relationship with this total turd of a man. The fact that it was published and is getting any press at all is proof that the patriarchy is alive and well. If you're interested in learning about her life, please read her memoir Bandit instead. Don't waste or your time or your money on this absolute slop.
June 5, 2024
this is a vile book, in premise and execution. tyler said “of all the trauma porn books you’ve talked about i feel like that book is right in the running for first place.” i thought often about that op-ed with the title “we know too much about each other;” it makes me wonder why butler feels compelled to share so much, and makes me question his intentions. why, i genuinely want to know, did he write this? why is it necessary for readers to know specifics of a dead woman’s damage? butler insists on including every grim disgusting freakish horrible detail, every sour note, like some sick inventory of his trauma. it feels distinctly and uncomfortably pathological, with a weird spiritualist dimension (more likely psychedelic-induced psychosis) to try and make the book something bigger than a catalogue of shock. as the book goes on, molly becomes flatter and flatter, less and less worthy of redemption.
it bears noting that the ethics of writing a work such as this one are complicated by the fact that the dead cannot respond; that we have no choice but to accept butler’s account as the true one, his voice as that of reason. for better or for worse, and i suspect in this case for worse, the bereft always get the last word.
the text is also rife with mistakes; at one point full sentences are duplicated and intercut in a different paragraph on the same page. Butler repeats himself, using the same “higher highs fund lower lows” over and over. sentences get tangled up and murky leaving me unsure of where they’re going, which feels like too exact of a metaphor for this book’s intentions/lack thereof. the section where he begins going to therapy feels like it was written with AI, and I don’t know what more i can say except that it all feels deeply, incorrigibly oily and rotten at a central level. there are some genuinely brilliant sections, beautifully written and full of insight on loss, forgiveness, and the nature of reality, but it is not enough for me to forgive the rest
in sum this book is utterly unbearable; the events described therein clearly ruined molly and butler’s lives and now the book is ruining mine as well
it bears noting that the ethics of writing a work such as this one are complicated by the fact that the dead cannot respond; that we have no choice but to accept butler’s account as the true one, his voice as that of reason. for better or for worse, and i suspect in this case for worse, the bereft always get the last word.
the text is also rife with mistakes; at one point full sentences are duplicated and intercut in a different paragraph on the same page. Butler repeats himself, using the same “higher highs fund lower lows” over and over. sentences get tangled up and murky leaving me unsure of where they’re going, which feels like too exact of a metaphor for this book’s intentions/lack thereof. the section where he begins going to therapy feels like it was written with AI, and I don’t know what more i can say except that it all feels deeply, incorrigibly oily and rotten at a central level. there are some genuinely brilliant sections, beautifully written and full of insight on loss, forgiveness, and the nature of reality, but it is not enough for me to forgive the rest
in sum this book is utterly unbearable; the events described therein clearly ruined molly and butler’s lives and now the book is ruining mine as well
January 19, 2024
i loved patricia lockwood's review of this book and unfortunately prefer it to the actual book. it's rich with the accumulated years of knowing someone abruptly gone, abruptly mythic- painstakingly recalled and reinterpreted memories, wavering- but it was poorly edited to the point of surprise. some of the prose was incomprehensible and read like a frantic first draft. i can appreciate the effort given the near impossible task of turning one's grief over interminably, searching for something unmistakable. in terms of the ethical debate, the author could have done without the misguided gesture at a diagnosis, as if that truly enriches a reader's understanding of who molly was. i also have mixed feelings about the inclusion of her childhood journals. i otherwise generally agree with stephen ira's assessment that people are allowed to write about the way you've treated them. my favorite section of this book is when blake asks molly to "show me your new face," i feel haunted by that still. molly brodak i love your poetry.
March 18, 2024
3.75
i keep reading books that i’m ambivalent about, although maybe that’s a good thing??
rtc
i keep reading books that i’m ambivalent about, although maybe that’s a good thing??
rtc
April 7, 2024
Nope, just no.
February 17, 2024
First off, I'm laying out my cards. I don't like Blake Butler. As a person or as a writer. I find his attempts to be a more entropic version of Ben Marcus to be insufferable solipsism. I don't like his cruelty, his nihilism, and his lack of empathy. His "career" has been a great con and he has brilliantly succeeded in fooling the literary world.
Having said all this, what happened to him was terrible and deserving of empathy. And Blake Butler is a human being who, like all human beings, is deserving of love.
But he really doesn't have the courage to tell the truth here. And after reading MOLLY, I trust this guy even less.
He alludes early onto how important his mother was to him and it's clear, from the way he describes Molly, that she serves as a surrogate mother. But he lacks the guts to tell us WHY he loved her. And that's very important. And by love, I'm not talking a laundry list or an idyllic moment of riding on horseback together. I'm talking about the nuts and bolts of love. The messiness of love. He alludes at one point that he was attracted to her outlaw ways. But that's not enough. And then he tries to make himself the innocent here with all the huge romantic gestures. Come on. The kernel of any strong relationship lies within the emotional dynamic.
It doesn't help that he describes the alleged "reality" of their relationship in hyperbolic terms. Really, you said nothing as Molly's neighbor was taking a shit with the door open (and, uh, honestly what kind of apartment has that layout?). Molly ALWAYS had sex with you shrieking at the loudest possible volume and yet this detail is elided in later moments of Molly in sexual congress? Did any of this even happen? Conveniently, there is, of course, no way to corroborate any of this.
I'll give him credit for deferring the act of announcing himself as the ultimate victim to the last possible moment, when the treasure trove of videos and photos of Molly committing all manner of sex acts to the men she cheated on is finally revealed. I'll also give him credit for announcing early on that it's absurd for him to claim Molly's story as his own.
And yet he DOES ultimately claim Molly's story as his own. Because that's the only way he can view the world. With Blake Butler as the ultimate detached describer. It's deeply frustrating because there are moments of potential clarity and raw description that make this book far more palatable than any of the other bullshit he's bestowed on us.
Which, come to think of it, is why I don't like him as a man or as a writer. If he's this detached in his forties, Jesus Christ, will he ever learn? He describes floating out of his body at several times in the book. He has boasted about his binge-drinking in interviews related to this book.
Blake, buddy, you're a mess. And it isn't Molly. You have to connect yourself to the world with full sober clarity, including all the devastating pain, whether you like it or not. That is the source of true love and true strength. It truly saddens me that you do not understand this. (And go ahead and post this to your rinkydink social media like you do with all the other Goodreads naysayers. I do not care. I have nothing to hide. YOU have everything to hide.)
He's buried his inherent selfishness and his utter failure to understand human connection so hard within the prose. But its there. And honestly he should have waited ten years before writing this. When he had more of his shit together. When he fully understood that NOT judging and NOT taking over someone's narrative (even though -- just to be clear -- he DOESN'T do it with Molly nearly as much as some critics have falsely reported).
If you find out something terrible about the person you love, do you want know what you do?
You love the person anyway.
That's what most people do.
If the person you love is in the past and they have hurt you, you hold onto that love. Or you at least understand that love so that you can place it into some healthy corner of memory so that you are prepared for the person who comes along who you are MEANT to love.
You accept the people you love as human. You also accept (in Molly's case) that the person in question was a mentally disturbed individual. The one thing you don't fucking do is view yourself as a victim. And you sure as hell don't try to reinvent the events from unreliable memory so that you are the hero of your own story. For the first 200 pages, Blake didn't. And then he did.
Now keep in mind that I'm only basing this on a book. I haven't sat down and talked to the guy. And what is contained in writing and contained in the person are two different things. But Blake here thinks he can love. But it seems to me (at least from the book) that he can't. And while I'm sorry for all he had to go through, I'm sorry, but the guy should never have written this until he DID understand this.
Between this book and the recent Emily Gould essay published in The Cut, what we are dealing with now in the literary world is an epidemic of emotional unawareness, of cluelessness, of insensitivity, and, above all, a lack of empathy. Spill your guts when you are clearly troubled, but to hell with reflection. And it's all being encouraged by animals who are no different from Trump supporters in their sociopathic bloodlust and in the way they throw peanut shells at those who are in significant pain.
I sincerely hope that Blake Butler recovers.
Having said all this, what happened to him was terrible and deserving of empathy. And Blake Butler is a human being who, like all human beings, is deserving of love.
But he really doesn't have the courage to tell the truth here. And after reading MOLLY, I trust this guy even less.
He alludes early onto how important his mother was to him and it's clear, from the way he describes Molly, that she serves as a surrogate mother. But he lacks the guts to tell us WHY he loved her. And that's very important. And by love, I'm not talking a laundry list or an idyllic moment of riding on horseback together. I'm talking about the nuts and bolts of love. The messiness of love. He alludes at one point that he was attracted to her outlaw ways. But that's not enough. And then he tries to make himself the innocent here with all the huge romantic gestures. Come on. The kernel of any strong relationship lies within the emotional dynamic.
It doesn't help that he describes the alleged "reality" of their relationship in hyperbolic terms. Really, you said nothing as Molly's neighbor was taking a shit with the door open (and, uh, honestly what kind of apartment has that layout?). Molly ALWAYS had sex with you shrieking at the loudest possible volume and yet this detail is elided in later moments of Molly in sexual congress? Did any of this even happen? Conveniently, there is, of course, no way to corroborate any of this.
I'll give him credit for deferring the act of announcing himself as the ultimate victim to the last possible moment, when the treasure trove of videos and photos of Molly committing all manner of sex acts to the men she cheated on is finally revealed. I'll also give him credit for announcing early on that it's absurd for him to claim Molly's story as his own.
And yet he DOES ultimately claim Molly's story as his own. Because that's the only way he can view the world. With Blake Butler as the ultimate detached describer. It's deeply frustrating because there are moments of potential clarity and raw description that make this book far more palatable than any of the other bullshit he's bestowed on us.
Which, come to think of it, is why I don't like him as a man or as a writer. If he's this detached in his forties, Jesus Christ, will he ever learn? He describes floating out of his body at several times in the book. He has boasted about his binge-drinking in interviews related to this book.
Blake, buddy, you're a mess. And it isn't Molly. You have to connect yourself to the world with full sober clarity, including all the devastating pain, whether you like it or not. That is the source of true love and true strength. It truly saddens me that you do not understand this. (And go ahead and post this to your rinkydink social media like you do with all the other Goodreads naysayers. I do not care. I have nothing to hide. YOU have everything to hide.)
He's buried his inherent selfishness and his utter failure to understand human connection so hard within the prose. But its there. And honestly he should have waited ten years before writing this. When he had more of his shit together. When he fully understood that NOT judging and NOT taking over someone's narrative (even though -- just to be clear -- he DOESN'T do it with Molly nearly as much as some critics have falsely reported).
If you find out something terrible about the person you love, do you want know what you do?
You love the person anyway.
That's what most people do.
If the person you love is in the past and they have hurt you, you hold onto that love. Or you at least understand that love so that you can place it into some healthy corner of memory so that you are prepared for the person who comes along who you are MEANT to love.
You accept the people you love as human. You also accept (in Molly's case) that the person in question was a mentally disturbed individual. The one thing you don't fucking do is view yourself as a victim. And you sure as hell don't try to reinvent the events from unreliable memory so that you are the hero of your own story. For the first 200 pages, Blake didn't. And then he did.
Now keep in mind that I'm only basing this on a book. I haven't sat down and talked to the guy. And what is contained in writing and contained in the person are two different things. But Blake here thinks he can love. But it seems to me (at least from the book) that he can't. And while I'm sorry for all he had to go through, I'm sorry, but the guy should never have written this until he DID understand this.
Between this book and the recent Emily Gould essay published in The Cut, what we are dealing with now in the literary world is an epidemic of emotional unawareness, of cluelessness, of insensitivity, and, above all, a lack of empathy. Spill your guts when you are clearly troubled, but to hell with reflection. And it's all being encouraged by animals who are no different from Trump supporters in their sociopathic bloodlust and in the way they throw peanut shells at those who are in significant pain.
I sincerely hope that Blake Butler recovers.
Read
January 24, 2024No rating.
I shouldn't know any of this.
There's no argument from me on publishing this; this is between the maker and the motion, as they say. But I shouldn't have been able to read it. If I die and you have the notion to read my group chats, my text messages, my emails, my personal writings, learn from this book: stop reading. Delete. Wipe the phone. Burn the journal. Set yourself free. Let the ones you loved be the ones you loved.
Sure, some people have their illusions spoiled in real time, in the act(s), via video, by a concerned friend, by a jilted lover. But never read someone else's journal if you loved them. It can only cause pain, and, devoid of context, it can only be read in your voice and with your hurts.
If you want to know about Molly, read Patricia Lockwood's review of this book.
That said, this book does an incredibly beautiful and painful service to its readers: it shows you the act of "eliminating one's own map" as Wallace said, and the result of that act in a way I've never seen rendered before. And I've been in his shoes, or I've watched someone else tie them on, at least.
I shouldn't know any of this.
There's no argument from me on publishing this; this is between the maker and the motion, as they say. But I shouldn't have been able to read it. If I die and you have the notion to read my group chats, my text messages, my emails, my personal writings, learn from this book: stop reading. Delete. Wipe the phone. Burn the journal. Set yourself free. Let the ones you loved be the ones you loved.
Sure, some people have their illusions spoiled in real time, in the act(s), via video, by a concerned friend, by a jilted lover. But never read someone else's journal if you loved them. It can only cause pain, and, devoid of context, it can only be read in your voice and with your hurts.
If you want to know about Molly, read Patricia Lockwood's review of this book.
That said, this book does an incredibly beautiful and painful service to its readers: it shows you the act of "eliminating one's own map" as Wallace said, and the result of that act in a way I've never seen rendered before. And I've been in his shoes, or I've watched someone else tie them on, at least.
January 13, 2024
this felt gross to read. it felt like this man journaled some very real trauma but it shouldn’t have been published. he carefully manipulated the image and reputation of his dead wife and published it in a way that is icky
December 11, 2023
“A girl grinning, golden hair, all limbs in casts.
A day made just for leeches.
I wrote many letters, never received.
Asound of a train as if understood.
An emblem.
A single black day behind, a single black day ahead.
A song sung so low it stays.
Clean cold soft sheets.
The full moon.
Pine in sun.
Images of planets from the right distance, this one too.”
A day made just for leeches.
I wrote many letters, never received.
Asound of a train as if understood.
An emblem.
A single black day behind, a single black day ahead.
A song sung so low it stays.
Clean cold soft sheets.
The full moon.
Pine in sun.
Images of planets from the right distance, this one too.”
Read
August 30, 2024whew this is a tough book to find words for. this is not a book that i would casually recommend due to the content. the first 30 pages of this book, where butler describes in detail the end of his wife’s life, were so harrowing that i had to put the book down for a few days. he then examines the beginning of their relationship, its many ups and downs over the years, molly’s childhood and family life, and the complex grief he felt after she took her own life. i cried at the way blake describes everything he loves and admires about molly. it was tough to read about the way both of them struggled with their mental health. there is a level of honesty and rawness in this book that i don’t think i’ve encountered before.
many readers have pointed out the gray area that this book lives in, due to the things that butler has revealed about molly now that she is no longer here to tell her side of the story. i’m struggling to figure out where i stand on the issue. where is the line of demarcation between blake’s story and molly’s? is it right for him to divulge the affairs that she kept secret while she was alive, that he only found out about after her death? i’m not sure. i think he has a right to tell the story of his grief, but i’m not sure we as readers needed the intimate details of what molly was doing in private.
one other thing i will say is that i wish this book was edited a bit better. butler obviously has a way with words, but i found many of the sentences lost their clarity because they were overwritten. this might be petty but there were grammar and spelling issues that made it difficult to understand at times.
i don’t think i can really give this a rating. it is an immensely difficult read, so personal - making me understand why a lot of people choose not to rate nonfiction.
many readers have pointed out the gray area that this book lives in, due to the things that butler has revealed about molly now that she is no longer here to tell her side of the story. i’m struggling to figure out where i stand on the issue. where is the line of demarcation between blake’s story and molly’s? is it right for him to divulge the affairs that she kept secret while she was alive, that he only found out about after her death? i’m not sure. i think he has a right to tell the story of his grief, but i’m not sure we as readers needed the intimate details of what molly was doing in private.
one other thing i will say is that i wish this book was edited a bit better. butler obviously has a way with words, but i found many of the sentences lost their clarity because they were overwritten. this might be petty but there were grammar and spelling issues that made it difficult to understand at times.
i don’t think i can really give this a rating. it is an immensely difficult read, so personal - making me understand why a lot of people choose not to rate nonfiction.
January 16, 2024
in early March, 2020, the writer Molly Brodak died by suicide. Blake Butler chooses to open his story of their marriage there. From there, he goes back to the beginning, through her death, and through the aftermath--where he discovers that throughout their marriage, she was unfaithful.
Some critics have called this book unfair and exploitative, taking advantage of a dead woman with mental illness who cannot answer back. I don't think it is. Butler turns it into a story of a marriage and how, and if, we know those we love. His portrait of Molly is complex and multidimensional. She's artistically talented, passionate, by turns loving and manipulative. The official revelations about her come late in the book and really aren't mined for prurient detail, no matter how the Daily Mail spun it.
But here's the rub: The entire time Butler talks about their relationship, even as he withholds the truth from the reader (presuming they haven't been spoiled), he's writing it knowing what comes next. All his memories are now reshaped by that, and even if he doesn't say so explicitly, it's clear from later in the book that he knows it. His artistic choices are entirely shaped by this knowledge. And so Molly becomes a story of how we know people, what we know, how we put them together in our minds. We think we can see the signs of Molly's self-destruction, because Blake can see them now. He even lists the DSM-V definition of borderline personality disorder. He doesn't diagnose her, and neither will I, but the criteria definitely fit with her behavior as described. Of course, we're getting that through Blake. I actually don't believe he's intentionally manipulative of the reader on that point, or of Molly's mental troubles, which are clear enough from her actions even without his contextualization. It's simply a reminder of how a memoir like this is a dance between writer and reader.
Butler probably polishes himself a touch, but he's honest about at least some of his own flaws, and overall, the impression is one of catharsis -- that he's spilled all his grief and love and anger and inability to comprehend either Molly or what she has done onto the page. Is it ethical? I don't entirely know. If anyone has the right to do this, it's her husband. People have criticized him for using her journals and suicide note. I certainly can't criticize him for using her own manuscripts that were either published or intended for publication. The impression that I got was not of a clear victim on either side. He's not just a victim of her manipulation, and she's not a victim of revenge from beyond the grave. The ethics are certainly complicated by her own willingness to use her trauma in writing.
Some critics have called this book unfair and exploitative, taking advantage of a dead woman with mental illness who cannot answer back. I don't think it is. Butler turns it into a story of a marriage and how, and if, we know those we love. His portrait of Molly is complex and multidimensional. She's artistically talented, passionate, by turns loving and manipulative. The official revelations about her come late in the book and really aren't mined for prurient detail, no matter how the Daily Mail spun it.
But here's the rub: The entire time Butler talks about their relationship, even as he withholds the truth from the reader (presuming they haven't been spoiled), he's writing it knowing what comes next. All his memories are now reshaped by that, and even if he doesn't say so explicitly, it's clear from later in the book that he knows it. His artistic choices are entirely shaped by this knowledge. And so Molly becomes a story of how we know people, what we know, how we put them together in our minds. We think we can see the signs of Molly's self-destruction, because Blake can see them now. He even lists the DSM-V definition of borderline personality disorder. He doesn't diagnose her, and neither will I, but the criteria definitely fit with her behavior as described. Of course, we're getting that through Blake. I actually don't believe he's intentionally manipulative of the reader on that point, or of Molly's mental troubles, which are clear enough from her actions even without his contextualization. It's simply a reminder of how a memoir like this is a dance between writer and reader.
Butler probably polishes himself a touch, but he's honest about at least some of his own flaws, and overall, the impression is one of catharsis -- that he's spilled all his grief and love and anger and inability to comprehend either Molly or what she has done onto the page. Is it ethical? I don't entirely know. If anyone has the right to do this, it's her husband. People have criticized him for using her journals and suicide note. I certainly can't criticize him for using her own manuscripts that were either published or intended for publication. The impression that I got was not of a clear victim on either side. He's not just a victim of her manipulation, and she's not a victim of revenge from beyond the grave. The ethics are certainly complicated by her own willingness to use her trauma in writing.
May 8, 2024
Shockingly bad. I don’t have an ethical objection to this book per se; I think it is reasonable that aspects of Molly’s story become intrinsic to Blake’s life in the course of their relationship and his desire to get to the bottom of who she was is understandable. That said, Blake’s account of Mollys life reads as vindictive, one sided, and a cheap attempt to use her story as fodder for his really mediocre writing. To be clear, though Blake features in this book, it is a book primarily about deeply personal details of Molly’s life: the way she has sex, how she feels about her body, journal entries from childhood, conversations with her therapist, etc. We don’t get anything remotely as intimate about Blake who prefers to treat Molly’s private life as an opportunity to pontificate on the meaning of love and grief. I’m am curious not why Blake felt compelled to write this (he’s angry and grieving, I get it), but why he felt compelled to publish it. Why he is so eager to tarnish the public memory of someone he claims to love while sharing comparatively little about himself. It’s hard not to come to a cynical conclusion. Unfortunately for Blake, he’s not winning any points back with his writing which is TERRIBLE. The book is poorly structured, meandering, and repetitive often to the point of incoherence. For all the time Blake spends sharing his Deep Thoughts we are left with lackluster insights. My overwhelming take away was a feeling that Blake is extremely angry at Molly which makes me feel sad and also like I shouldn’t have spent $17 to read this.
Want to read
December 5, 2023well I did want to read this but no ebook in the year 2023???
January 24, 2024
Probably the most intense account of grief I've ever came across. I have yet to lose a loved one in my life, but this painted such a detailed portrait of that feeling I almost felt its shadow looming over me, breathing down my neck. In that sense, it can be a more terrifying read than most horror novels. But it's also beautiful and painfully sincere, especially in how unafraid it is to become all messy and jumbled, maybe because the written word is an unfitting language for the pain of losing someone. Maybe it is... I couldn't know.
December 20, 2023
Throughout the book, Blake extols Molly's artistic credentials and achievements almost as a form of recursion punctuating the malformed sense of self-worth Molly held regarding herself and how it shaped her worldview. It is this recursion which emphasizes one of the overarching themes: impostor syndrome as a byproduct of trauma; how trauma ravages any modicum of artistic credibility and by extension any feelings of love, stability in purpose, and merits of existence in a world plagued by fear, hatred, and violence. Artists are inherently overwhelmingly sensitive to ideas of death, thus the very experience of life in a world of symbols which begs meaning is a hidden gauntlet.
It is gradually revealed following her death that Molly had a second-life built around performance, displaying self-destructive behaviors rife with contradictions of how Blake perceived Molly. The turn in the story comes with the floor of his reality shifting realizing how the love of his love went to great lengths not only to hurt him, but herself. What follows then carries the most weight in Molly's foundation: the contradictions and paradoxes that live within someone with trauma and the impossibility of knowing someone fully.
Rather than choose a path of judgement, Blake chooses instead of path of understanding. And in his insatiable hunger for understanding her actions and philosophies he finds that seeking understanding is in fact the precursor to madness. Towards the end of the book, Blake quotes Simone Weil, "I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness."
As someone with PTSD, I resonated strongly with the complexities and contradictions of trauma causing a split being explored--in my own self-destructive behaviors leaned into as a means of self-harm stemming from an inability to feel loved, how I presented myself to those I cared for differed greatly from how I presented myself in the embrace of strangers; a mad pilgrimage of the flesh, my body became a tool in fueling the disassociated lusts of others, and whenever someone told me I deserved love it only furthered a guilt complex that it was not a matter of letting others down, only a matter of when. I mention this as I feel it necessary because my heart broke reading about Molly's own self-destruction and how she simply could not feel love despite trying, and these contradictions are a means of someone inhabiting a space--once their body--haunted by an inability to see the potential for beauty in their own lives and refute those who try.
The ethics in publishing a suicide note, reading emails, personal journals, and the means of information being disclosed are up for discussion, and the discourse surrounding this is one that bear interest. Yet the through line of Molly I believe is the struggle of two traumatized people coping with existence in their own ways and the very contradiction of this stemming from their philosophies.
It is made evident earlier how often Blake and Molly clash on an ontological level surrounding the innate feelings toward life and the world at large. To be overly reductive, Molly felt the world was shitty, humans were shitty, yet paradoxically believed that the world would be a better place without her in it and by proxy the people she knew in it. Blake, again to be overly reductive, believes despite the nightmarish qualities of the world and life itself that the very experience of life is what overrides a desire towards death--he supports this when, following one of the most beautiful passages in the book, he surmises that Nothing but love can shift the cycle. Nothing but love remains for long.
Love as a means of shifting the cycle becomes apparent as truth through the faith that trauma itself is a cycle containing facts and nothing can change the facts. The fact that you will never be who you once were again, the fact that you will carry the ghosts not only of your former lives but those within them, the fact that what you went through happened, the fact that try as you may you will never understand why these things happened and why people did what they did. But love shifts the cycle, it does not break it -- it can only change its intensity. All you can do is have the courage in feeling and giving love as a means for the potential of growth and moving forward.
What gives this truth and why I find credence in this idea of love is the brutal honesty in which Blake depicts his experience processing trauma after the death of Molly. He doesn't shy away from writing about the self destructive habits he used, the violence he foisted upon himself, the intense emotions of self-loathing and hatred for others and daydreams of harming those who forced Molly's hand as he lies the blame on everyone, including himself. There are no screens in his writing. I believe he anticipates scrutiny not only for his own actions, but for the ethics surrounding this book as a whole. I encourage those curious to look into the interviews he has given following the release of Molly, as many of them go into detail about these ethics and reasoning behind the inclusion of such personal infromation.
Experiencing the change of his writing from the nightmarish avant garde to pointed reflection over the years, witnessing the vulnerability that necessitates the journey within Molly, is what allows the blows to land and invoke within the reader their own reflections not only for the contradictions imbued within Molly, but also within Blake, and, once again, the means for which this information is disclosed. But it is not for you to understand, just like, Blake concludes, it is not for him to understand Molly and her contradictions for attempting so would only drive one towards madness. All one can do is find the courage in feeling, in giving love and experience life as it happens forgoing answers, despite the horrors, despite the damage, despite the contradictions.
It is that Unknowing which grants clemency finding the potential for beauty moment by moment--beauty, the foil of madness, the innate euphoria negating understanding yet reinforcing an adoration of living without reason--and in this a respite, however brief, however fragile. The only way for me to complete this book is to live. Blake writes.
To live and never understand why is the fulcrum of being. And in that Unknowing, a letting-go.
It is gradually revealed following her death that Molly had a second-life built around performance, displaying self-destructive behaviors rife with contradictions of how Blake perceived Molly. The turn in the story comes with the floor of his reality shifting realizing how the love of his love went to great lengths not only to hurt him, but herself. What follows then carries the most weight in Molly's foundation: the contradictions and paradoxes that live within someone with trauma and the impossibility of knowing someone fully.
Rather than choose a path of judgement, Blake chooses instead of path of understanding. And in his insatiable hunger for understanding her actions and philosophies he finds that seeking understanding is in fact the precursor to madness. Towards the end of the book, Blake quotes Simone Weil, "I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness."
As someone with PTSD, I resonated strongly with the complexities and contradictions of trauma causing a split being explored--in my own self-destructive behaviors leaned into as a means of self-harm stemming from an inability to feel loved, how I presented myself to those I cared for differed greatly from how I presented myself in the embrace of strangers; a mad pilgrimage of the flesh, my body became a tool in fueling the disassociated lusts of others, and whenever someone told me I deserved love it only furthered a guilt complex that it was not a matter of letting others down, only a matter of when. I mention this as I feel it necessary because my heart broke reading about Molly's own self-destruction and how she simply could not feel love despite trying, and these contradictions are a means of someone inhabiting a space--once their body--haunted by an inability to see the potential for beauty in their own lives and refute those who try.
The ethics in publishing a suicide note, reading emails, personal journals, and the means of information being disclosed are up for discussion, and the discourse surrounding this is one that bear interest. Yet the through line of Molly I believe is the struggle of two traumatized people coping with existence in their own ways and the very contradiction of this stemming from their philosophies.
It is made evident earlier how often Blake and Molly clash on an ontological level surrounding the innate feelings toward life and the world at large. To be overly reductive, Molly felt the world was shitty, humans were shitty, yet paradoxically believed that the world would be a better place without her in it and by proxy the people she knew in it. Blake, again to be overly reductive, believes despite the nightmarish qualities of the world and life itself that the very experience of life is what overrides a desire towards death--he supports this when, following one of the most beautiful passages in the book, he surmises that Nothing but love can shift the cycle. Nothing but love remains for long.
Love as a means of shifting the cycle becomes apparent as truth through the faith that trauma itself is a cycle containing facts and nothing can change the facts. The fact that you will never be who you once were again, the fact that you will carry the ghosts not only of your former lives but those within them, the fact that what you went through happened, the fact that try as you may you will never understand why these things happened and why people did what they did. But love shifts the cycle, it does not break it -- it can only change its intensity. All you can do is have the courage in feeling and giving love as a means for the potential of growth and moving forward.
What gives this truth and why I find credence in this idea of love is the brutal honesty in which Blake depicts his experience processing trauma after the death of Molly. He doesn't shy away from writing about the self destructive habits he used, the violence he foisted upon himself, the intense emotions of self-loathing and hatred for others and daydreams of harming those who forced Molly's hand as he lies the blame on everyone, including himself. There are no screens in his writing. I believe he anticipates scrutiny not only for his own actions, but for the ethics surrounding this book as a whole. I encourage those curious to look into the interviews he has given following the release of Molly, as many of them go into detail about these ethics and reasoning behind the inclusion of such personal infromation.
Experiencing the change of his writing from the nightmarish avant garde to pointed reflection over the years, witnessing the vulnerability that necessitates the journey within Molly, is what allows the blows to land and invoke within the reader their own reflections not only for the contradictions imbued within Molly, but also within Blake, and, once again, the means for which this information is disclosed. But it is not for you to understand, just like, Blake concludes, it is not for him to understand Molly and her contradictions for attempting so would only drive one towards madness. All one can do is find the courage in feeling, in giving love and experience life as it happens forgoing answers, despite the horrors, despite the damage, despite the contradictions.
It is that Unknowing which grants clemency finding the potential for beauty moment by moment--beauty, the foil of madness, the innate euphoria negating understanding yet reinforcing an adoration of living without reason--and in this a respite, however brief, however fragile. The only way for me to complete this book is to live. Blake writes.
To live and never understand why is the fulcrum of being. And in that Unknowing, a letting-go.
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