Grief’s Many Voices: On Blake Butler’s “Molly”
Blake Butler | Molly | Archway Editions | December 2023 | 320 Pages
There is a particular landscape of loss that comes from uncovering secrets about the dead. It is a landscape defined by the loss of the beloved, and then by the compounding loss of betrayal.
This complex terrain has been charted in a number of popular narratives—we seem to be fascinated not just by tragedy, but by the posthumous realization of double lives, secret families, fabricated narratives, and unreliable narrators; perhaps we sense that we, too, are building our lives upon a series of illusions, and are at once desperate to know what lies beneath the veil and terrified to ask too many questions. In these narratives of compounded loss, there appears an instability so intense, a void so potent that madness is liable to subsume the discoverer of truth into its gaping maw.
In many of these stories, the protagonists cling to tropes to keep them steady, seeking clearly defined roles for themselves like the ones provided by genre fiction. It’s not just the loss of a specific person, but the accompanying loss of certainty, the shared narrative, and the ensuing search for self in the wreckage of the “us” that leads the protagonists to these tropes, even—and often—against their better judgment.
One archetype is the Investigator. In the novel Biography of X (2023), the narrator becomes obsessed with tracking the history of her long-term partner, X, who dies unexpectedly. The narrator turns to this Investigator role, going into the “field,” interviewing subjects, and uncovering romantic affairs that X never disclosed during their marriage. The Investigator encounters a classic tension: The desire to know leading to painful knowledge, and the impossibility of understanding.
In Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment (2002), when the narrator’s husband leaves her for their former babysitter, she transforms into the Jealous Lover, or poverella, driven to madness over a man. She says to herself, “Don't act like the poverella, don’t be consumed by tears.” The character’s grief is so extreme that she begins to hallucinate poverella appearing in her office, the fact of her hallucination confirming that she has already become the Mad Lover archetype
Another role of grief is that of the Director. In the film Drive My Car (2021), the main character, Yusuke Kafuku, is a director and actor whose wife dies just after Yusuke discovers her affair with a younger man. Later in the film, he casts the lover as the character he himself once played in a Chekhov play about love and deception. Kafuku is the Director (literally), recreating the dynamics of his own life on stage—this time with the man who was once his wife’s lover in his own place—so that he might understand it, or perhaps, feel some narrative power over it.
Blake Butler, the prolific novelist, memoirist, and short fiction writer, recently entered this landscape of loss and betrayal by writing a memoir about his late wife, the writer Molly Brodak, who died by suicide in 2020. The book bears her name, but ends up being a double portrait of their psyches. As in the aforementioned narratives, by looking outward, one ends up looking in. The line between the self and the other is the problem, or the question, and the book is a series of answers, rendered in continually shifting forms and tones.
The memoir is fragmentary, beginning with a harrowing description of Molly’s suicide, leaping back to Butler’s and Molly’s respective childhood traumas, their shaky beginnings as a couple, the many fights, the moments of transcendent love, and, also, their mutual betrayals—Molly’s ongoing infidelities, only discovered after her death, and Blake’s reckoning with the questions of “betraying” her story by writing it. Butler is unsparing in describing their relationship problems, the trauma of her suicide, and the destabilization and horror he feels at discovering her affairs. Yet the memoir renders her in her particulars—her assiduous work ethic, her charisma, her perfectionism and talent (in writing, baking, and teaching, her main passions)—with undeniable delicacy. The pairings of contradictory emotions—anger and admiration, fear and adoration, toxicity and dedication—give readers emotional whiplash, mimicking Butler’s own as he tries to assimilate the two Mollys: the one he knew and the one he learned about posthumously.
Looking back at an email that Molly sent to him early in their relationship, Butler describes Molly’s tone as a “revolving door of woe.” This is an equally apt way to describe the nature of Butler’s own fragments: in revealing each new facet of Molly, he takes on a new role, until writing Molly also becomes writing Blake. As with the narrator in Biography of X, Butler adopts the role of Investigator upon discovering the suicide note; her absence turns him into Ferrante’s Mad Lover; there are entire sections dedicated to recreating scenes in their relationship through the light of his new knowledge, as he becomes a Director in his own right. Unlike these other texts of loss, he never settles on one position, the memoir reading like a “revolving door” of these roles: Pathologist, Mad Lover, Investigator, Director, Freudian Psychoanalyst, Diarist. The book becomes a study in the motion of grief—untidy, uncertain, deeply personal—rather than an arrival at any stable truth that he or the reader craves.
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Butler opens the memoir by detailing the day of Molly’s suicide: “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 . . . It’d been a long winter, one of the hardest of our lives.” He speaks of passing her in the hallway, her wrapping her arms around him, bringing in one of their chickens to cheer her up; he describes the song he listened to on his run, and the arrival home to a note on the door addressed to him: “A plain white envelope, affixed with tape. My body seized.” The same imagistic details, calm scene setting, and nearly objective reportage are employed as he describes searching for and eventually finding her body, the bullet hole in her chin.
In his own words, he “[cleaves] onto facts,” as if getting the physical details correct will make sense of the suicide. This clarity of vision also lends credence to the moments where he dips into extreme physical metaphors to describe his emotional state: his “blood replaced by poison” or “the atmosphere . . . ripped off and all the air sucked out around us.” One senses this isn’t hyperbole but as close as language can come to describing his experience, this new and inexplicable phenomenon occurring in his body.
Like the narrator in Biography of X, Butler clings to the remaining physical proof of Molly’s life: “I was focused, mostly on her letter, getting it back [from the police], so I could read it over and over, search for its sense; as if, like Molly, only work could save me now.” Here we get a sense of Butler’s project: to write Molly’s world in such detail that he might create firm ground for himself to stand on. He renders other scenes of his life with Molly with precision—her background, her prolific career as a writer, teacher, and baker, her intellectual preferences, her aesthetic tastes, the sites of important events in their life together, the animals they raised, their (shared) obsession with work. Except, like in Biography of X, the desire to ground himself leaves him more groundless, in turn spurring him further down the rabbit hole. He writes of this investigative impulse: “Behind closed doors . . . I couldn’t keep myself from digging deeper into any shred of evidence of Molly’s secrets: her journals and her email and receipts and social media correspondences, all of which entwined to form a very different picture of her than I had ever known.” Like with X, the discovery of that physical world Butler puts him on more uncertain footing. He writes: “I could touch my face and feel it there, but who was I and why and how?”
The desire to represent Molly’s voice—in its compassion and its cruelty—drives much of the book. It is not uncommon for Butler to become Archivist, letting Molly “speak for herself,” as he shares her letters and emails, unpublished manuscripts and poems, sometimes without context. Among these documents, in one of the most gutting moments of the book, is the full text of her suicide letter to him. She writes, “The marriage we had was like a place I’ve never known. Safe and good,” attempting to reassure him that “Nothing could have stopped this. Your love, no one’s love.” She tells him where to find her body, and finishes with: “Please make art for me. I will read it all. I will always be with you.”
On the one hand, she tries to separate her actions from his, to affirm that the quality of their love had no bearing on her own desire for death. Though, of course, by addressing this letter to him and by leaving with him the last moments of her life and with her body, she also intertwines her own psychological pain with his—she makes her death a secret only they share.
Thus Molly after her death—as evoked by Butler the Archivist—is cruel and loving in ways she was in her life. Through her poetry, letters, and emails, her voice infuses the text, both chastising him quietly for his failed attempts to portray her correctly and egging him on, into living and creating art.
These contradictions might be beautiful if they weren’t also so overtly toxic, a reflection of the intense tumult of their relationship. There are moments when a reader might be tempted to diagnose Molly’s particular variety of caprice and manipulation. Only in one section, however, does Butler explicitly play the Pathologist: “Though she never received a specific diagnosis—that I know of—in looking back after her death, it’s hard not to read the DSM-5’s description of the traits of borderline personality disorder and not find Molly there in every line.” There are countless moments in the text that confirm this diagnosis—early in their relationship, he says, “She seemed to loathe certain attributes about me . . . so openly at times it made me wonder what she’d liked about me in the first place.” He tiptoes around her explosive responses, “keeping close tabs on what I knew might piss her off … I’d be labeled selfish, full of shit.” She dislikes his friends, is suspicious of him, chastises him, and attempts to elicit his jealousy. He writes of her flaws openly and yet also consistently inspects his own culpability in the dynamic, as well her history; in some moments, he cushions the blunt tools of the Pathologist with those of the Freudian, reflecting on her traumatic childhood: “I can’t even fully fault her…despite the knowing looks I get when I’ve tried to suggest she’d learned to wield her story as a weapon after having had no choice as an abused child, the extent of which I still believe that no one will ever know,” Butler writes. “Abuse is passed on through more abuse, of course, and who was I to want someone to be able to withstand that, to foment change.”
Some might criticize him for excusing her abuse of him so readily; others can—and have—accused him of a kind of posthumous abuse of her story. Both arguments have kernels of truth—he even entertains the possibility of both himself. Indeed, soon after its publication, the discourse around Butler’s book was clouded by the question of whether this story was his to tell. But these squabbles seem to overlook the empathy and attentiveness that Butler pays to Molly. For in a world so prone to dismissal by way of diagnosis, the Pathologist’s read can feel as sparse as the Biographer’s plodding. There is deep grace in Butler’s quest for an image of Molly beyond her trauma, beyond her pain and lying, a search for “the depth of drive I knew and felt behind her eyes, of her precious desperate want for peace and beauty despite the sick reality she often insisted was the only truth, consuming all.” Another writer would spend a whole book framing Molly in terms of psychological afflictions. By limiting this section, he grants her the humanity of not naming her by her personality disorder. Right or wrong, his abridged detour into the DSM-5 makes the book more compelling. It shifts the questions from What did she have? Or What was wrong with her? to more fundamentally ontological ones: What happened? And what is real? These are questions that the Biographer's, Archivist’s, and Pathologist’s tools are not equipped to fully answer.
To attempt to parse the reality of his marriage from its fictions, Butler turns to the role of the Director: “Even knowing what would happen to us,” he says, “as I write now, there are still so many aspects of the timeline that don’t add up, or at the least feel very different from the way I’d always framed them, to the point of no longer knowing what I should believe.” Like the Director in Drive My Car, he restages and revisits the conditions of his betrayal, letting them play out before his eyes. After describing the “rapt abandon” on Molly’s face on their wedding day, for example, he reflects: “Would I still have married her had I known what she was up to behind my back?” This is the pain of compounded loss: The dissonance between Butler the Character, who acted in these scenes, and Butler the Director, who sees the stage of his life not just from his own perspective, but with an eye to how every character and moment fits together, finding himself more peripheral, more blind, than he felt at the time.
One of the largest betrayals that Butler reflects on is Molly’s secretive planning for suicide—buying the gun, writing the letter, waiting for the opportunity for weeks. These he discovers by reading through her diaries. Yet more dishonesties accumulate posthumously: emails reveal that the weekend she spent at a retreat was really spent with a lover, to whom she had been sending Butler’s money; others reveal that she had been grooming her undergraduate students; texts, sexts, and videos unveil numerous physical and emotional affairs with other men. “It would begin to feel like lucid dreaming more than living at times,” Butler writes, “in looking back on my old memories and finding them rewritten from within, made even more difficult to put in order or to narrate meaning into without her here, not seeking answers as much as asking questions and trying better to interpret the silence left between.” It’s one thing to process the death of the woman he loves, but another to question the life that they lived together. As the suicide is soon submerged in the murky waters of secrecy, the Director restages his life but doesn’t recognize the blocking.
If Molly's behavior in real life was not enough to drive one crazy, this negotiation with the past might be. And crazy is not so far off, for many of the sections of Molly twist beyond what anyone would call perfectly sane; certainly, much of Butler’s prose feels like he is pulling that “lucid dream” to the surface for all to see.
Butler’s world turns supernatural in the depths of his grief, as he embodies a kind of poverella. He describes visions of demons beckoning him beyond the grave, and writes of Molly speaking to him from a Borgesian maze. In other moments, he mixes images and metaphors: “Layers of gray on gray formed to appear there in my mind . . . I found that I could scroll my mind-state forward from on the far side there, like open falling without boundaries of physics or intent.” Within a page this Mad Man Butler transforms into Butler the Self Help Writer. “Please speak up,” he writes, both addressing the audience and himself, “The world is clouded, but we must try, if not for ourselves, then for those who hardly even had a chance.” To steady himself after near-tumbles into incoherence, he returns as a guide—having traversed infernal depths—to affirm life’s validity.
In turn, these moments of Self-Help slip into cultural critiques: “We continue to persist within a culture where it’s been accepted that women are abused—and within that, that those who’ve been abused should often keep it to themselves, cope on their own, survive on their own.” This is Social Justice Activist Butler, who, by critiquing the societal infrastructure that permits abuse, seeks a porthole out of the myopia of his own grief. The shift feels abrupt, but we allow him, because the text is as much about what he’s saying as it is the many ways that he tries to say it, the motion of grief rather than its contents.
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There is a short story by Paige Clark called “Times I’ve Wanted to Be You” that begins—like Butler’s memoir—when her husband dies. The protagonist says, “I wish I were dead, and this is not the first time I’ve wanted to be him.” This shines light on a new role to which Butler also turns: the role of the deceased partner themself. Clark writes, “Sometimes it’s easier to give yourself up than someone else.” So, too, Butler threatens to slip into Molly’s perspective after her death.
Molly wrote a memoir of her father, a notorious bankrobber and compulsive liar, to work through the trauma of his abandonment. Butler says, “[Molly] was writing about her dad but really she was writing about herself.” Similarly, Butler’s perspective slides towards Molly’s; during their life together, Butler often adopted Molly’s misanthropy and nihilism, empathizing with her manipulative tendencies. In life, however, she was a physical presence who could speak for herself; in death, her absence threatens to obliterate Butler. He teeters on the edge of Molly’s subjectivity—toying with thoughts of suicide, writing a memoir that mirrors her own. He concludes that Molly’s father played the role of “egging her on into the void.” Molly beckons Butler toward the “void world of silence.”
The last section of the memoir is a letter from Butler, addressed to Molly, detailing his return to her home state, Michigan, where he wades into Lake Eerie; it feels oddly peaceful, simple, observational:
We watched the buoys across the lake’s face bob in a light wind, surrounded by strangers’ families splashing and chasing each other, which as you know would have usually annoyed me but now felt thankful, like a screen. After a while I got up and waded out into the water up to my knees. I tried to imagine where you might have been once, somewhere across it, probably teenaged, on a part of land consumed by the horizon, between the flat gray water and the sky, overcast then as it is today. I closed my eyes and raised my arms over my head and stood and listened. For a second, it felt like the center of the world, a place where anything could happen.
It is in some way the antithesis to her suicide letter in that it is a set of observations of the natural world around him: significant trees and rocks and water rendered in loving particularity. Butler leaves off because he has to go to therapy—a gesture toward continuing on. If Molly’s letter reinforced the codependence that made their relationship special but dangerously insular—a toxic greenhouse—his letter defies that privacy. He is writing to her, yes, but he is also writing to himself, and—even more—he is inviting us, the readers, into their world. He is sharing her with us. He ends with love not because of, but despite clarity. He ties her memory, his own writing, to life, to living.
In fact, part of what is so gracious about Butler’s depiction is his lack of resolution. His letter to Molly doesn’t feel like the last word. Like every other section, it is inconclusive; one gets the sense that these “revolving doors of woe” might continue on forever, that his mind, too, might never quite stop this restless cycling from Investigator to Director to Madman to Diarist to Activist. Some might see this as incoherence, ambiguity, or lack of resolution. And it’s true: he hasn’t exactly found a single, stable voice. But he hasn’t come to a conclusion regarding Molly, her character, or her story. Because that’s not actually the point. To conclude anything would be the real betrayal of his and Molly’s story. The point isn’t that he finds the answer, but that he keeps speaking.