It’s a disordered book, almost Lovecraftian at times in its airless luridness. By the end, the writing has become both tedious and odious. But the first 125 pages or so are electric and sharply observed. These pages have a midnight sort of impact many novelists would kill to smuggle into their fiction. This impact is amplified by photographs of its subject throughout. These can resemble Francesca Woodman’s otherworldly images.
“Molly” is about the writer Molly Brodak, who decided at 39 that the up in her could no longer fight the down. Her husband finds the many journals she left behind, some in plain sight. He reads them, as well as the contents of her laptop and phone, and he sees things he did not want to see, including graphic proof of nearly constant infidelities. He exploits this material to its fullest in his telling of their lives together.
Other writers have picked over the ethical issues of exposing this private writing. I will add only that Butler is hardly the first writer to publish a book that might have been alternately titled “Not My Story to Tell” — and, arguably, this is his story as well. He is unsparing about Brodak’s flaws, but his tone is warm and sympathetic. If you squint, you can see this tell-all, train-wreck memoir as an act of love. This is true even though, as the observant writer and undertaker Thomas Lynch reminds his readers, “the dead don’t care.”
Many fond things get said about Brodak. She was an accomplished poet, brainy, with a great laugh. Butler liked the way the light played in her grainy eyes. She was a sophisticated baker and happiest out in nature. She had a sardonic sense of humor. She was a perceptive consumer of books, movies and music. She was drawn toward, among other things both highbrow and low,
the style of Sofia Coppola, particularly “Marie Antoinette,” which she would watch on mute, just for the colors and the costumes, though I think really she loved it all and didn’t want to have to say, the way she’d sometimes get about the things she liked that she imagined other people thought were lame; the loner brooding of Cat Power, whose apparent madness she romanticized, solemnly relating a story of how Marshall once had played an entire show with her back to the audience.
Brodak had survived an appalling childhood. Her father robbed 11 banks and spent years in prison. His story is recounted in her book “Bandit: A Daughter’s Memoir” (2016). Her mother, a social worker, fought suicidal impulses and was a dark figure in her life. She brought home, and had violent sex with, awful men. Have you ever felt like crawling back into your mother’s womb? For Brodak, the answer was nay, and nay again.
She and Butler met in Georgia. He lived in Atlanta, near where he had grown up, and she was teaching in the state. Warning signs about her troubled psyche blink from the start. Suspense is the art of withholding information. Butler drops a disconcerting new fact every few pages.
