Blake Butler unpacks his wife's death and the secret life she hid from him in gripping 'Molly'

My interview with the author

Warning: This interview contains detailed discussion of suicide and trauma.

When Molly Brodak, an award-winning poet and university teacher in Atlanta, shot and killed herself on March 8, 2020, at age 39, her husband Blake Butler was shocked and devastated.

"I knew she was depressed, but how could she give up on me?" Butler, 44 told me in an interview for The New York Post. (Lots of spoilers in that link, if you care about that sort of thing.) "How could she give up on us? How could she give up on herself?” 

Butler didn't realize just how unhappy his wife was, and, as he writes in his explosive new memoir Molly, he would soon learn that there was much more he didn’t know about the woman he loved. 

As he went through Molly’s journals, emails, texts, and writing he realized that she had been living a double life — and the shocking details would upend everything Butler believed about their relationship and who Molly was.

Molly is a visceral portrait of a relationship, a gripping detective story, and an ultimately moving grief memoir. I spoke with Butler about the book, his marriage, and what he learned about love in the process. I wanted to include our conversation here, as a lot of it was left out in the New York Post story. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

I’ll be back later this week or next with a more “wearable” post. But in the meantime, I recommend Blake’s extraordinary book, which you can purchase here. 

Raquel Laneri: First of all, I'm sorry for your loss. 

I completely inhaled your new book, Molly, in less than 24 hours. It was really powerful.

I want to start with how you met Molly. You have this crazy first date, where you have to pick her up from jail and then she’s showing you her MRI results and saying she had previously had a brain tumor. It was kind of funny — like a meet-cute in a Katharine Hepburn-Carey Grant screwball, like Bringing Up Baby, but much darker.

BB: I first thought I had gotten stood up, because she didn't call when she said she was going to. So I was just going to go to another party when she called from the back of a cop car. But it wasn't like she was crying — she was kind of laughing and being like, You're not going to believe what happened! 

She made it seem totally relatable and like this big accident that she didn't deserve. And I think that happened a lot with her. Like, why does this Molly keep getting things dumped on her? But I didn't really know that at first. 

It was kind of like an adventure. I remember very vividly at one point she got up to go to the restroom, and as I watched her walk away, I just didn't even know what to think. She was just this beautiful woman that came out of nowhere and she seemed to bring chaos with her. But she also seemed to own it. And I found that very appealing. I was always kind of attracted to women who were kind of wild.

RL: You were going through a somewhat difficult time in your life, with your father struggling with dementia. Why did you want that kind of added chaos?

BB: I had in two really long monogamous relationships through most of my 20s, and I had never had my “wild days” or whatever. So I was dating a lot of people — the worst thing [a woman] could do was show me enthusiasm. I was trying to write, my dad was sick, so I was like I'm way too busy to get tied down again. I think Molly was shrew, because she could gather that about me. In fact, that first night, she asked me, Do you want to be alone? And I said, Yeah, I do. So while other women would chase me and call me over and over, Molly respected my wishes. And that made me question whether I really wanted to be alone. I trusted her. She was not a person who put on airs. She was very serious. And I was a very serious kind of dark person, and though I had friends all around me, I felt like no one really got me that much. Molly did.

RL: You broke up with Molly couple times, but you kept going back. What made you realize you actually wanted to marry her and be with her? 

BB: Writing this book has been interesting for me, because I when I write it out on paper, I'm like, What the fuck was I thinking? There were so many signs where it should have been enough to ward me off. 

I respected her so much — I respected what she'd been through; I respected her work. I was like, of course she's struggling because of look at what she's been through, and I guess I almost took it as a challenge — like if I can't love, if no one can love, this person then what the hell is love? It wasn't an overnight thing. And now I can see she adapted and changed so that I only saw the things she wasn't ashamed of. She was doing stuff that if I had found out I would have been like, Get out of here. 

But I still believe someone should have been the right person for Molly.

RL: You say, What was I thinking? But love is a mysterious thing. It can make you willfully blind to the more alarming parts of someone.

BB: I'm not going to excuse myself, either. I was definitely acting out. In the same way that there were things about her that gave me pause, she writes in her journal, I don't know why I liked this guy. He's not like the other people I would normally date. 

RL: She was troubled. Her dad was a bank robber. Her mom was bipolar and Molly had a traumatic childhood where she was kind of neglected. But you did have happy moments. What was one?

BB: The first birthday [we celebrated together] … She loves animals, so we went to the zoo, we went to a nice restaurant. And I could tell that she had not had a lot of that kind of focus of attention on her — especially from her family. I think part of her was looking for holes to punch in me of like, Yeah, that guy actually doesn't give a shit, and so whenever I did something that was tender — writing notes to her or sharing my work with her, opening up to her — it was special. 

RL: The day that she died you write that from early on in your relationship, you had visions of Molly picking up and leaving just like that. Was this something that was a constant low hum throughout or did that feeling increase in the time before her death? 

BB: I don’t know. She could be so cold suddenly. The first sign of that was like [when we were dating] she'd spent the night and as she was leaving, she would walk out the door and not look back. When we would get in arguments, she would just turn so brutal, say such brutal things out of nowhere. She would say things like, I can live alone. I don’t need this. I could disappear. 

And I knew she had tried to kill herself before. So I knew she was extreme. She wasn’t afraid to walk into damage when she was in that mood. I think I was held in thrall that way where I both cannot tell when she's gonna leave me, I'm terrified of what she would do if pushed to an extreme.

And that got really nasty in the last year of our of our of our relationship. She wrote that she knew that I had a different view of her than how she actually felt she was like. So she stopped doing the work of hiding that from me and became more and more brazen about doing stuff to get caught. If I had read her journals, I would have found her planning her suicide for months and also talking an extreme amount of trash about me. She would Tweet thirst trap-type photos, and I’d be sitting next to her on the couch. And she’d say, I’m just kidding around. It was like, dangling her indiscretion in front of me. And then and then if I pointed anything out, it was like, How dare you? … She could very easily manipulate me to feeling guilty. 

RL: When did you know that you were going to write a book about her and her death and your relationship and what you discovered about it?

BB: I knew very early after it happened. I remember I was running, and I said out loud, I'm going to write a book about you and I and it's going to be the best book I've ever written. And I'm going to do you justice. And I'm going to tell your story. And I'm going to make something out of this tragedy. 

Because I felt this hole in her absence. And as an author who makes my living writing, it was like, how can I dare write anything without addressing this very — you know, she's a public figure with her writing and I was not going to just write another book and pretend this didn't happen or keep it secret. It became a matter of survival. And, and a matter of like, how do I keep this person alive in my heart? And how do I keep alive? 

It's so complicated and so sad and probably more common than it might seem — not in the extremity [of Molly’s story], but lots of people suffer in secret. And so to me, it was like, You know what, I'm not going to suffer this in secret, I'm not going to swallow this.  

RL: You start the book with Molly’s death, and then tell the story of your relationship, and then what you found out in the aftermath of her death. But you weave in clues throughout, using her own published writing, her journals, lists, and such. How did you come up with that structure?

BB: Yeah, so as I said, I knew instantly that I wanted to write, but how do you even tell this story that has so many threads? When I began, I was just trying to write down everything I could remember while it was fresh. That version was much more mourning and chaos, and just kind of like getting it out. And then another poet friend who wanted to do a memorial magazine about Molly asked me to write an essay for it. And I began with ‘The first time I'm Molly, I picked her up from jail.’ 

That version was much more chronological and intuition-driven — coming straight out of my memories in my brain, rather than sourcing other documents. It was just like, the foundation comes from my, from my soul in my memory, and and then. So that was 10,000 words, and I was like let me finish the job, using the essay as the spine. 

And before I even started writing the book, I felt like a detective because the thing had happened, and I didn't know why. So it was like, I'm gonna read every one of her emails, I'm gonna read all of her Twitter, I'm gonna read any I'm gonna read everything I can that might have any shred of a clue. Because I didn't know why she did it. It felt like an impossible mystery. So that’s what the book became what it is now.

RL: Did you ever think it was possible where Molly had this secret life where she was having all these indiscretions and cheating on you?

BB: Never. Like when guys came up to her at bars, she was so mean to them. She genuinely didn't like people coming up to her. And I told her, in fact, I said the day before she did it, I was like, I'm so grateful to you that I don't ever have to worry about that. 

But I think she wanted me to be jealous, a little bit — because she was someone that has a hard time reading whether someone cares about them or not. Like she knew her dad loved her when he got mad and stood up for her. So I think [my easygoing nature] pushed her away. 

RL: How did you feel when you came across all this evidence that she had all these indiscretions?

BB: The first five days of her being gone, I didn't go through her stuff. I was just like, immobile and incapable of doing anything. I felt this real big gap in my soul of like, what went wrong? I knew she was depressed, but like, how could she give up on me? How could she give up on us? And how could she give up on herself? And so in some ways, when I started to find out the lies she was hiding, it was a bit more of a relief. It was like, Oh, I, it wasn't just that I failed her. It was that she had built this web of lies. 

So in some ways, I think that made my recovery easier, because it wasn't just this mystery of like, I'll never know why she did it. It was like, I still wish she hadn't made the choice. But it was like, now I can see she felt trapped. 

RL: How did writing this book change or shift the way you felt about her or understand her?

BB: I still think she's unknowable, because she's gone. And I'm still I'm mad at her. I'm very angry at her. I'm very angry about a lot of things. But at the end of it all, I still hold fast to that feeling that I've said at the beginning of that she still deserved to be loved. And I wish she had found ways to let someone know that she needed more help than she was getting. I really just see it as a tragedy. And, yeah, no one wants to be cheated on. And no one wants to find out they've been lied to through their whole relationship. But no one is irredeemable. So, I'm not going to demonize this person who suffered her entire life, because she had an affair or affairs. 

And you know, she lost her life and that struggle, and I didn't. I can move on and find new love. I can learn from her example in a way. So I'm grateful. I'm grateful for the experience of growing up from her — not grateful for having to reckon with her death. But I learned a lot from her: I got into therapy, I stopped drinking, I stopped abusing myself. I still have some struggles, but you know, I can make the best of it with what I have access to.

RL: What’s your life like now, in the wake of her death and writing this book?

BB: I moved away from Atlanta. I live in Baltimore now and I’m remarried: I live with someone. I've known my current wife for a long time, but it was always as friends and we kind of bonded over what we were going through. We both say that we met oddly at the exact right time, which is insane to think that that could happen in the wake of what happened. Coming out of my relationship with Molly, I had really learned to think of the world as as a place of pain. But I realized if I'm gonna survive Molly's death, I have to be able to look and see that there is more to life than [pain]. I was certainly not looking for [a relationship] I was looking for a way to destroy myself. But I have no real other explanation for it other than the world provided.

RL: What do you hope people get out of the book?

BB: I want people to know that you may think you're alone in your misery and that any outlet you find is a mirage. But while you may be alone in your misery, you're not alone. And I think [that thinking] is what brought Molly in part to her death. But I'm not gonna let that take me down. And I'm not going to let that take down others who are willing to listen to me to the extent that I can share any strengths I've been able to forge out of this tragedy. 

So I guess I'm trying to be honest. It’s true that the world can be messed up, but what are we going to do about it? This is only really the beginning of me doing something about it.