Chapter excerpt at the Paris Review
Last week a new memoir with the simple title of Molly got a five-star review in the Telegraph and a rave in the Los Angeles Times. Unusually for a literary memoir published by a small press, Molly also got the aggregation treatment from the New York Post and the British tabloid the Daily Mail. “Famous poet Molly Brodak had a secret life as a ‘serial cheater' who had affair with a student days after her wedding to author husband—and he only found out while preparing slideshow for her funeral after her suicide,” went the typically bloated, tell-it-all Mail headline.
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I get why postmortem publication of these kinds of secrets might give some people pause, but the book is so vital, so full of force, it's a memorial most people would be happy to leave behind—the “bad” parts included. Molly guts the cliché description of someone with mental illness—“She was troubled”—right down its belly, showing exactly how that trouble presented, its sound and smell and taste, how it grew and receded and grew, how it left Molly profoundly isolated from her family, her friends, her husband, everything she loved. (“She seemed more alone than anyone I had ever met,” Butler writes.) It doesn't pretend to know anything definitive about Molly at all—not-knowing is, in fact, part of its point. Butler is shattered at how he never really knew her. But he nonetheless describes her mind, and her ways of being, with such devoted attention that the book feels almost worshipful.
He was looking through her phone for photos to include in a slideshow at her funeral. That's when he learned she had cheated on him with numerous men.
He found troves of photos of her posing in lingerie and with s*x toys, along with videos of her pleasuring herself and saying the names of other men in a baby voice
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He's a writer? A writer? People pay for things he writes?
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You just dont know what its like to wade butt deep in the frickshit of morons
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There's hope yet for your literary career!
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