PicoBlog

Aside from the usual jangling of keys and rustling of nylon against black metal folding chairs, the audience was palpably hushed.  I’d swear the crowd’s apprehensive whisper was in anticipation of the third author, Blake Butler, set to read from his new surrealist memoir, Molly.

“I’m feeling nasty today,” Butler scoffed, stiff in his chair, then softened. “Not nasty, but heavy.” Makes sense: the titular Molly is wife and fellow author Molly Brodak, who committed suicide in early 2020.

As Butler began to read the opening section, a fly buzzed frantically around the microphone. He laughed at the fly’s first foray onto his face, but became increasingly miffed as he approached a passage wherein flies alight upon Brodak’s fresh corpse. It was the sort of dim full-circle moment one might consider an omen.

Butler had a fairly ominous week himself, making social media waves for Molly’s sensitive subject matter. Some felt Butler exploited the death of his wife— and publicized her infidelity— in a bid for attention and financial gain.

Meanwhile, colleagues on the internet— including Butler’s friends, mentioned in the acknowledgements at the end of Molly— rushed to his defense, imploring detractors to read the book. Butler himself even echoed the sentiment in a tweet. 

At the reading, Butler struggled through the first handful of passages. But the audience of about 50 people was hanging off every word. He stopped after a particularly shattering portion and the crowd erupted into applause, the closest I’ve seen to a standing ovation at a book reading. I had to read the rest myself.

Ultimately, this memoir is altruistic, quite obviously meant to grapple with inexplicable pain of loss and to honor his wife. Butler is bearing a weight you wouldn’t wish on anyone, the grief of Brodak’s death compounded by his parents’ decline from dementia. Molly is an exercise in continuing life however possible.

Butler is an unreliable narrator, to be sure. He seems to relish playing victim, as when he recounts the time Brodak taught him the term gaslighting, only to accuse her of gaslighting him herself throughout the majority of the relationship. Later, after recounting an STD scare— ostensibly from one of Brodak’s affairs— Butler explicitly labels Molly abusive.

“I don't mind admitting it, now: the word abuse, which I would have never imagined saying about her when she was alive.” It may be dishonorable behavior, but the accusation of abuse rings hollow. Even so, earlier in the book, Butler confesses to extramarital escapades of his own, shrugged off with nonchalance. He often gives himself more grace than he extends to Molly, callinghis reliability into question. Additionally, Butler’s double standards make it difficult to engage with the book at times, lamentations of Brodak’s actions falling flat in light of the skims over his own sins

The most jarring moment in the book is Molly’s suicide note, reprinted verbatim.  It’s not the first suicide note to go public— Hunter S. Thompson and Virginia Woolf come to mind— and Butler explains away his choice to publish by his belief that Molly wrote the suicide note for the world to see.

“I don’t want to say anything about this letter,” writes Brodak in her book Bandit, also reprinted in Molly, about her estranged father’s six-page letter explaining away his life of crime and absentee parenting. “It’s the least I can do now, to let him speak for himself.” It’s an attempt by Butler to excuse the suicide note’s inclusion, but it’s a false equivalency. For one, Brodak’s dad was still alive at the time of Bandit’s release, so he was always going to have a chance to respond. Second of all, Butler doesn’t show the suicide note without comment as Brodak does in her own work, writing about her own experience and then attaching the note at the end of the book. In Molly, the suicide note appears within the first 30 pages, after which he spends the entire rest of the novel poring over its meaning.

But respect for Brodak’s authorial approach can’t explain why Butler aired her most private infidelities, something that even he admits didn’t appear in her voluminous personal journals. If Molly wasn’t able to come to terms with her own transgressions behind closed doors, why does Butler have the right to say that we deserve to learn about them?

Butler acknowledges this tension throughout the book. “Should I be allowed to make this said? To bring to light a part of Molly’s story she covered over at any cost? At this point, I feel I hardly have a choice, given the way the story, bound up inside me, feels like frying in a slow execution, with nowhere else to set it down.”

And he may be right. If creation is your catharsis, then leaning into your own truth is the only path to salvation. Butler isn’t a totally objective narrator, prone to self-martyrdom, but he comes across as earnest, vulnerable, and true to his own raw emotions, even while the world around him crumbles. “What happens when people open their hearts?" author Haruki Murakami once mused. "They get better.” Near the book’s close, Butler recalls his late mother’s dedication to the serenity prayer: strength to accept, courage to change.

Despite the vitriol, Butler  allows Brodak grace and forgiveness on the surface. Even if it reads scrupulously and he allows himself more grace than her, the effort is there. And Molly isn’t an attempt at exoneration, anyway: readers will be hard-pressed to ignore Butler’s own unhealthy and transgressive behavior.

Readers have long been inured to this type of miscreant in novel format— think Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye— but an unreliable narrator of questionable character in real life can be unsettling. Still, it’s to Butler’s testament that his flaws are largely on display in Molly. Vulnerable writing makes for incisive, interesting writing. And when have we ever asked writers to be beacons of morality anyhow? While there may be healthier ways to cope than airing the darkest corners of your life for the world to see, it’s pointless to project our own proclivities onto Blake’s life.

In a way, Butler’s circle of loved ones are to blame for Molly’s shortcomings. It’s as if nobody told him no — a better writer than I could dream of being, the editors of this book did Butler a disservice. There are meandering, run-on sentences, which— even if the lack of intervention came from a good place— is an injustice to the visceral and profound nature of the book, where sometimes the most meaningful passages begin to feel clunky and labored.

I don’t know Molly. Maybe she would’ve loved this book. But is that the point? We, as readers, do not need to become the arbiters of morality or defenders of the dearly departed. Our job is to read, and to give someone a chance to share their voice before rushing to conclusions. After living with this story for 300 pages, it’s difficult to see how any reader would come to the conclusion that there are any consciously exploitative choices at play here; Molly is a harrowingly personal memoir about a flawed, unreliable narrator laying it bare the best way he knows how, heartsick for the love of his life and reckoning with the simultaneous death of illusions he kept about their relationship. It’s likely not a mistake that everyone I’ve seen or spoken to who has actually read the book has come away with significantly more forgiving opinions on it than random internet accounts who somehow came away with a final conclusion the literal day of the memoir’s release. A book— or any work of art, for that matter— doesn’t have to be tidy and sterile to be worth existing.

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