I recently finished reading Blake Butler's memoir Molly. I've not been so taken aback by a memoir in a long time. Butler tells the story of his life with Molly Brodak. I highly recommend the book as a deeply emotive and insightful look into a person whom Butler obviously loved and as a mirror into oneself. The abyss certainly stares back.
Blake Butler's latest book is Void Corporation, published in 2024.
The following paragraphs are the start of Molly, and I'd like to offer a trigger warning: mention of suicide and anxiety.
A Sunday afternoon in early spring. We’d spent the morning quiet, in separate rooms—me in my office, writing; Molly, my partner, in the guest room, working too, so I believed. Sometimes I’d pass by and see her using her computer or reading from the books piled on the bed where she lay prone or staring off out through the window to the yard. It was warm for March already, full of the kind of color through which you can begin to see the blooming world emerge. Molly didn’t want to talk really, clearly feeling extremely down again, and still I tried to hug her, leaning over the bed to wrap my arms around her shoulders as best I could. She brushed me off a bit, letting me hold her but not really responding. I let her be—it’d been a long winter, coming off what felt like the hardest year in both our lives, to the point we’d both begun to wonder if, not when, the struggle would ever slow. I wished there could be something I might say to lift her spirits for a minute, but I also knew how much she loathed most any stroke of optimism or blind hope, each more offensive than the woe alone. Later, while passing in the hallway in the dark, she slipped her arms around me at the waist and drew me close. She told me she loved me, almost a whisper, tender, small. I told her I loved her too, and we held each other standing, a clutch of limbs. I put my head in her hair and looked beyond on through the bathroom where half-muted light pressed at the window as through a tarp. When we let go, she slipped out neatly, no further words, and back to bed. The house was still, very little sound besides our motion. After another while spent working, I came back and asked if she’d come out with me to the yard to see the chickens, watch them scour through the grass for bugs, one of our favorite ways to pass the time. Molly said no, she didn’t want to go, but asked if I’d bring one to the bedroom window so she could see—something I often did so many days, an easy way to make her smile. Outside, it was sodden, lots of rain lately, and the birds were restless, eager to rush out of their run. I scooped up Woosh, our Polish hen, my favorite, and brought her over to the window where Molly sat. This time, though, when I approached, Molly didn’t move toward us, lift the sash, as she would usually. Even as I smiled and waved, holding Woosh up close against the glass, speaking for her in the hen-voice that I’d made up, Molly’s mouth held clamped, her eyes like dents obscured against the glare across the dimness of the room. Woosh began to wriggle, wanting down. The other birds were ranging freely, unattended—which always made me nervous now, as in recent months a hawk had taken favor to our area, often reappearing in lurking circles overhead, waiting for the right time to swoop down and make a meal out of our pets. So I didn’t linger for too long at the window, antsy anyway to get on and go for my daily run around the neighborhood, one of the few reasons I still had for getting out of the house. I gripped Woosh by her leg and made it wave, a little goodbye, then hurried on, leaving Molly there looking back out at where I’d just been, onto the lone sapling that she’d planted just last spring so one day she wouldn’t have to see the neighbors.
During my brief absence, Molly had gotten out of bed, up and about for one of only a few times that whole day. I found her in the kitchen with the lights off, standing as if dazed by my appearance, arms at her sides. The room around us in that moment—dim, traced with a glow, half-hollow where the walls arrange themselves against the black side of my mind—will remain burned in my memory forever as the last time I’d see Molly alive, all prior memory we’d shared in that same space half covered over, like a drowned ship, the last few seconds of our home. Molly seemed to clench up as I came near her, letting me put my arm around her once again, but staying loose, confused, on edge. I realize now she must have had the gun on her already, getting ready for the endgame of her plan. She hesitated when I asked her if she’d finished her manuscript, said I was surprised she hadn’t mentioned it. Yes, she said, she guessed that it was finished, her diction tight, quiet, just like it had been all that week. A draft at least, like no big deal, still work to be done, always more. I told her I was excited to get to read it either way, that I was proud of her, and I squeezed her closer, just a moment, then let go. She seemed to hover there in front of me a moment, waiting mute for what I’d do next. I asked if after I got finished running, maybe we could go to Whole Foods, pick up some dinner stuff to cook together, maybe watch a movie, have a nice night. She said yes, that sounded good, and I said I’d see her soon, then left her standing in the kitchen in the dark.
On my run, I worked my way along the same path I often made around our neighborhood, following its pattern without thought. I don’t remember seeing any other people, then or later, though I must have; in retrospect, the smaller details fade to gray around the corridor of time spent rushing forward in the wake of what awaited just ahead. I’d always liked the way the world went narrow in this manner during exercise, leaving nothing else to do but the task at hand, one foot in front of the other, counting down without a number. Near the end of the run, as I did often, I decided to extend my route, turning back around to double back the way I’d just come, adding on an extra half-mile on a path that took me past the entrance to the gardens where Molly and I would often walk in warmer months along a creek, searching for animals. The sidewalks in this part of the neighborhood were cracked and bumpy, requiring specific care not to trip. I pulled my phone out to see how far I’d gone and saw a ping from Twitter telling me that Molly had made a post, just minutes past—a link to a YouTube video of “The Old Revolution” by Leonard Cohen, including her transcription of the song’s opening line: “I finally broke into the prison.” I liked the tweet and thumbed the link immediately, opening the song to let it play, happy to imagine her selecting the closing soundtrack for my run home, just a couple blocks away now. “Into this furnace I ask you now to venture,” Cohen sang, in cryptic lament, coyly backed by a doomy twang. “You whom I cannot betray.”
The song was still there with me in my head as I arrived back at our driveway. Looking up from halfway along the path toward our front porch stairs, I saw a shape covering the door’s spyhole—a plain white envelope, affixed with tape. My body seized. From early in our relationship I’d had visions of Molly picking up and leaving just like that, deciding on a whim and without warning she preferred to be alone. Running up the steps, already flooding with adrenaline, a pounding pulse, I saw my first name, Blake, handwritten in the center of the envelope’s face in Molly’s script. Immediately, I wailed, devoid of language, too much too fast, real and unreal. Inside the envelope, a two-page letter, printed out. My mind froze on the first lines: Blake, I have decided to leave this world. Then there was nothing but those words—words to which I have no corollary, no distinct definition in that moment, even as simple as they seem. Every sentence I’ve tried to put here to frame it feels like a doormat laid on blood, an unstoppable force colliding with an intolerable object in slow motion, beyond the need of being named. Before and after.
Out of something like an instinct, I forced my eyes along the rest of the letter, not really reading it so much as scanning for a more direct form of information, anything she’d written that might tell me where she was—which, near the end of the second page, I found: I left my body in the nature area where we used to go walking so I could see the sky and trees and hear the birds one last time. Then: I shot myself so it would be over instantly with certainty and no suffering whatsoever. This time, when I screamed again, it was the only word that I could think of: No. I must have sounded like a child jabbed in his guts, squealing. I knew exactly where she meant—I’d run right by it, just minutes before, perhaps a few hundred yards away. I might have even crossed her path had times aligned right, had I known. A sudden frenzy of possible options of what to do next swarmed my brain, none of them quite correct, devised in terror.
At the edge of the sidewalk, I stopped and tried to think if I should go inside and get my keys and drive to where she might be, or if I should run there fast as I could, still in my running clothes, already half-exhausted and slick with sweat. Each instant that I didn’t do exactly the right thing felt like the last chance, a window closing. Finally, I took off running at full speed along the sidewalk, shouting her name loud as I could, begging her or me or God or whoever else might be able to hear me: No, please, Molly. Not like this. No matter what I said, there was no answer; no one on the streets surrounding, zero cars. Ahead, the sidewalk seemed to stretch so far beyond me, no matter how fast or hard I ran, growing longer with every step; all the houses shaped the same as they were always, full of other people in the midst of their own lives. As I ran, I tried to scan her letter, held out before me with both hands, already wadded up in frantic grip, scanning through fragments of despondent logic that felt impossible to connect with any actual moment in the present as it passed. “Everyone’s life ends, and mine is over now,” she’d written in present tense about the future, which was apparently in the midst of happening right now—or had it already happened? Was there still time? I felt embarrassed, sick to my stomach, to feel my body’s power giving out no matter how hard I tried to maintain sprint, forced instead at several points to slow down against the burning in my muscles, sucking for air with everything I thought I knew now on the line.