Book Review : Blake Butler - Molly (2023)

On March 8 2020, Molly Brodak committed suicide. She was an award-winning poet, memoirist, local entrepreneur and the wife of novelist Blake Butler. But she was also much more than that. Molly was complex, wounded and filled with venomous contradictions that were both hurtful to her and others, like many human beings are. She lived public and secret lives and carried public and secret burdens that weighed so heavy on her shoulders, they eventually got the best of her. 

Molly is mostly her story. It’s also the story of what it’s like to survive her and what it’s like to survive the suicide of the love of your life. 

This memoir could be broken down in three parts: the day Molly died, their life together and what life is like now that she’s gone. Each builds upon one another to create the portrait of a woman who isn’t a victim, a saint or an abuser, but an uncomfortable and human in-between who Blake Butler loved more than anything in the world. I can’t think of a more generous and loving gesture towards a departed loved one than to grant her immortality through literature. To offer her so completely to the judgment of strangers and yet claim "I loved her through it all."

How to talk about suffering

Although the beginning of Molly is terrifying to a point where it could trigger people who lived trauma related to suicide, it’s crucial to Blake Butler’s project of explaining his late wife. It’s crucial to understand how badly she was suffering, because it tainted a lot of her life. Suffering can express itself under the form of self-harm and crying fits, but it can also express itself under the form of self-defeating beliefs and behaviors, all of which undermined the life of Molly Brodak.

One particularly heartbreaking anecdote in Blake Butler’s memoir recalls Molly winning a poetry prize and immediately collapsing into tears claiming that her win proved that the prize was a sham and that no one valued anything anymore. That anecdote can be used as a prism to understand how Molly Brodak thought of herself. As the antithesis of who and what she dreamed about. Her mere corporeality implied imperfections incompatible with her lofty aesthetic ideals. Disappearing felt to her like getting out of her own way.

But such compassionate and easily relatable anecdotes were just a part of Molly’s self-destructive behavior. Sometimes she acted out against whatever and whoever made her feel validated, which really is the true face of mental illness. I don’t feel comfortable sharing in what way she did act out on Blake in this review (it’s for the book’s readers to discover), but this is what people undergoing a mental health crisis do. They will go above and beyond in order to validate their negative self-image because this is what feels true. 

Molly speaks an unflinching truth with such love and compassion that it blurs every attempt at morality beyond Blake Butler’s own dedication at loving his wife against the most adversarial circumstances. He describes the incredible violence her inner, unspoken desires exerted against their marriage in such painstaking details that they don’t feel evil or justifiable. They just happened. They were the symptoms of a self on fire, perpetually trying to construct an identity it couldn’t (and probably didn’t want) to construct.

A lot of people are going to judge Blake Butler and Molly Brodak both after reading this, but I find it impossible. Their written story is a tragedy that needed to exist in order to show the true face of the ordinary evils that wreck so many adult lives.

How to be present

This is not your typical Blake Butler book. I’ve been a fan of his for several years now and I could only describe his writing style as on the edge of consciousness. Somewhere between a waking and a hypnagogic state, conjuring demons without shape of form that aren’t normally accessible in our creative vocabulary. Molly is, by far, Butler’s most straightforward and down to Earth book. He looks outward at the person he loved the most instead of inwards at the apocalyptic kaleidoscope inside his head.

His obstinate resolve not to make the emotional read of any conflictual situation and attempts to deconstruct his own understanding of the world in order to integrate her own makes Molly such a special reading experience. Butler is intellectually, emotionally and spiritually present, or at least he tries to. Maybe he wasn’t as present when his wife was alive, but the way he embroidered her presence in his brain and filters her essence through his in his memoir will make you wish someone loved you as much as Blake loved Molly. 

Molly is the most immediate and arresting example of what Chuck Klosterman meant when he said: "Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you." This memoir is both. Art and love.

What’s so heartbreaking about Molly is that it’s ultimately the autopsy of failures: the failure to raise a daughter, the failure to save a life, the failure of a marriage, the failure of love to solve everything. But what are we doing out there if not fending off our inevitable failure for the longest time possible? Everything is temporary even when it feels immortal and eternal. Blake Butler and Molly Brodak lived the kind of love Leonard Cohen talked about when he sang: "Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin." Warm, life-affirming and yet cruelly ephemeral.

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I’ve been volunteering at a suicide hotline since November of last year. Molly Brodak is an extreme case of what kind of distress we’re dealing with on the phone, but there are people who suffer in the way she suffered. I believe the hypothesis Blake Butler makes at the start of Molly was right: borderline personality disorder. Also probably depression, which made it even harder to ask for help. You can’t ask for help if you don’t feel worthy of it. Mental Health is complicated and Molly exemplifies how much so.

I usually give the books I review a rating based on a 10 points system, but I don’t feel it’s appropriate to judge this story for anything other than what it is. An appropriately heartfelt goodbye to the most important person in someone’s life. It is not my story to deconstruct for imperfections. Molly should be understood, celebrated and remembered as such. It will be officially released on November 21st. You can (and should) pre-order it right now. 
 

10/10

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* If you’re having suicidal thoughts, whether you’re fearing for a loved ones or are yourself bereaved by suicide, please dial 988, 1-833-456-4566 in Canada or 1-866-APPELLE in Quebec. There is 24/7 help for you *