A terrifyingly intense and eerily spiritual book ... On the most superficial level, Molly’s story is an interesting one. But Butler’s talent as a writer makes this book into more than grisly fascination. Molly forces its reader to look deeply into the well of intergenerational trauma, neglect and, most of all, responsibility — the artist’s responsibility to art and themselves, our responsibility to one another as human beings ... Brisk, bracing, and brutal ... Butler’s prose, coupled with the disturbing but necessary questions he raises, makes it the best book I’ve read this year.
Butler recounts, with horrifying immediacy, the horrifying immediacy of dealing with an abrupt and violent death, of being thrust, in a moment, into the chasm between the crowded world of the living—where procedures must be followed, questions answered, phone calls made—and the too-private, upside-down world of loss ... Gender operates in a fascinating way in Molly, as Butler, sensitized to the many pitfalls of male power, compensates for it to a fault ... One of the saddest strains of this powerfully sad book involves the decline of Butler’s parents, who each come to suffer from dementia; he is particularly close to his mother and, after she is widowed, becomes her primary caretaker. Molly, wary of Butler’s family bonds, tends to pull away when he is most in need of her. 'We didn’t need anybody but ourselves, I started thinking,' Butler writes. That’s never true, but no one seems to be around to tell him so ... You can feel the flayed rawness of Butler’s quest; he seems, at times, to be writing from the emotional equivalent of hurricane conditions, skipping a word, repeating a phrase, sending long, lashing sentences into the wind. His new clarity can be profoundly painful ... That is a poisoned kind of sense-making, and one way to parse the worst of Molly’s behavior is as a grim attempt to prove her point by making herself indisputably irredeemable. But Butler does dispute it; his book is his proof. 'Stay alive,' Molly told Butler, and that is what he wants the rest of us to do, too. Writers are often praised as 'fearless,' but Butler is not. In Molly, he makes fear his companion. That is the only way to write, and to live.
A resurrection animated by loss and its affects, from shock to grief, anger to guilt. As a text, it is promiscuously digressive, polyvocal, and sort of messy, calling on those who encounter it to ask: How should a grief memoir be? ... I’ve tried to meet it first as a text, which is to say, as a knot of language I am, at least in part, tasked with undoing. But I also respect its work as the testament of a fellow sufferer, someone whose dignity and grief should and must command my attention ... Molly isn’t, and could never be, the “truth” of Molly Brodak. It’s Butler’s truth: one among many ... Brodak’s story leaks beyond the bounds of Molly.
An atrocity exhibition. Butler taps a vein of garish and almost comic malevolence that keeps flowing ... It’s a disordered book, almost Lovecraftian at times in its airless luridness. By the end, the writing has become both tedious and odious. But the first 125 pages or so are electric and sharply observed ... He is unsparing about Brodak’s flaws, but his tone is warm and sympathetic. If you squint, you can see this tell-all, train-wreck memoir as an act of love ... My feelings about this book are mixed, but I won’t forget reading it. It makes you look up at the sky, fearful of what might fall out of it.
The book is so vital, so full of force, it’s a memorial most people would be happy to leave behind ... t 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 ... I’d urge anyone upset about the idea of this gorgeous, sad memoir—as I admit I was at first—to read the book.
Intensely detailed and imbued with intimacy ... Butler references his rage throughout, but passively dismisses Brodak’s complaints about his inattentiveness.
Devastation provides clarity. Through therapy, Butler is able to notice the cycle of abuse and express it sharply. Butler’s details of Molly’s suffering are plentiful and vivid ... Transcends time and space, life and death. We are always surprising ourselves, realizing what we are capable of. The bottomlessness of misery is matched by the inconceivable heights of joy; at the end of the day, fear is just the sharp edge of awe ... I don’t think it is foolish to believe that the answer to oblivion is both love and art, the two—maybe only—vessels for infinity, and the main reasons to continue living.
...alternately harrowing and philosophical, mixing details of their years together with discourses on Nietzsche, God, and more. Butler describes Molly's mental illness; her divorced father, who 'kept a secret family and went to prison twice for robbing banks'; the baking business she started on the side; and her infidelities before and during their marriage. The grim subject matter may upset some readers, but Butler writes beautifully, with elegantly bitter prose, as when he notes 'the endless sprawl of mass putridity God had allowed to persist in the same space as his supposed lambs.' For readers who have experienced similar tragedy and seek commiseration, Molly will be welcome company.
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 ... 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 ... 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 ... 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 ... 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.
