MOLLY
by Blake Butler
2023
Paperback
4 7/8 x 7 in.
320 pages
ISBN 9781648230370
A gripping, unforgettable memoir from one of the best, most original writers of the 21st century.
“Terrifyingly intense and eerily spiritual … The best book I’ve read this year.”
—LOS ANGELES TIMES
“[5 stars] … Extraordinary and raw … the triumph of his book lies in its compassion.”
—THE TELEGRAPH
“A powerfully sad book … 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.”
—THE NEW YORKER
“Molly is so vital, so full of force … [it] guts the cliché description of someone with mental illness … [a] gorgeous, sad memoir.”
—SLATE
“Molly is a dark, gorgeously crafted read. It contains a tremendous amount of pain, and the loss of life, loss of potential, loss of what could have been weighs heavy. That Butler makes it out the other side whole enough to tell this story is the glimmer of hope that sustains the reader in the end.”
—THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION
“Shattering … The result is a brutal yet beautiful look at the ravages of mental illness and the complexities of grief.”
—PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY
“I’m not sure I’ve ever been so totally consumed by any book—the way I was by Molly.”
—INTERVIEW
“As the story of a marriage, Molly sees that desire, like love, can be both ignited and fractured by the unknowability of the other.”
—BOOKFORUM
“The most immediate feeling of life I’ve ever had reading a book—a life lived at the desk and out in the world, a life of openness and secrets. ‘Make art for me,’ Molly wrote to Blake. ‘I will read it all.’ I breathed along with every word.”
—PATRICIA LOCKWOOD
(more in London Review of Books)
“How to praise a book of such wounded beauty as Blake Butler’s phenomenal Molly? The same way one would a life lost early: with love and sincerity and anger and wonder and lithely elegant and observant insights that remind us and inspire us, as Butler precisely does, to live and to love ourselves.”
—JOHN D’AGATA
“Molly is a brilliant and brutal book. Blake Butler fearlessly takes on love and grief and the mysteries of this world and the next.”
—EMMA CLINE
“A dark miracle—actual evidence that what we can never know, what we could never imagine about the one we love, is what binds us to them, beyond death.”
—MICHAEL W. CLUNE
“I was gripped from the start by this memoir’s urgent honesty. Blake Butler turned a story that was almost unspeakable into a narrative at once brutal and loving, broken and solid.”
—CATHERINE LACEY
Blake Butler and Molly Brodak instantly connected, fell in love, married and built a life together. Both writers with deep roots in contemporary American literature, their union was an iconic joining of forces between two major and beloved talents.
Nearly three years into their marriage, grappling with mental illness and a lifetime of trauma, Molly took her own life. In the days and weeks after Molly’s death, Blake discovered shocking secrets she had held back from the world, fundamentally altering his view of their relationship and who she was.
A masterpiece of autobiography, Molly is a riveting journey into the darkest and most unthinkable parts of the human heart, emerging with a hard-won, unsurpassedly beautiful understanding that expands the possibilities of language to comprehend and express true love.
Unrelentingly clear, honest and concise, Molly approaches the impossible directly, with a total empathy that has no parallel or precedent. A supremely important work that will be taught, loved, relied on and passed around for years to come, Blake Butler affirms now beyond question his position at the very top rank of writers.