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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: Make Art for Me

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: A warning before we get into today's episode: we talk about suicide, so please skip this one if that is not what you need to hear about today. OK, here goes. This is Poetry Off the Shelf. I'm Helena de Groot. Today, "Make Art for Me." Molly Brodak did not trust stories in her memoir Bandit. She digs up the root of her mistrust. It was the story she heard on the evening news about her dad. Her dad was a disappointing character to begin with, a man who would pop by with wads of cash, then disappear for weeks; a man who took his nine or 10-year-old daughter on a trip to Cancun, only to leave her in the hotel room most days so he could go gambling; a man who turned out to have a whole secret other family. Now, this man had been arrested for robbing banks, something the news narrated as being out of character. Here was a decent man, their story went, a provider who was driven to extreme measures when he lost his job manufacturing cars in Detroit. After the arrest, Molly found refuge in poetry.

At the school library where 13-year-old Molly spent her lunch breaks, she'd been steadily reading her way through the fiction shelves, but "Now," she writes, "I moved across the aisle to the poetry section and set my fingers on the oldest-looking book on the shelf, Leaves of Grass. I pulled it down and opened to the center of the book: 'And go lull yourself with what you can understand and with piano-tunes, for I lull nobody, and you will never understand me.' I snapped the book shut as if I'd seen something in it move," Molly writes. That's when she knew poetry was, quote, "A better way to the world, more honest, more direct, sharper." In March of 2020, when she was 39, Molly Brodak took her own life. In her suicide note, she wrote to her husband, the novelist Blake Butler, "Please make art for me, I will read it all." Now, Blake Butler has come out with a memoir of his own, simply titled Molly. In Molly, he tells the story of their life together and how after her death, this story started to unravel. Take the day they met, in 2010. Molly had agreed to meet Blake, but she hadn't shown up to the date. Later that night, Blake got a call from an unknown number. It was Molly calling from a cop's phone. The car she'd been driving, her roommate's car, had been seized by the police because of expired tags. Could he come and pick her up at the jail? They ended up spending the night together, and after that, met up more or less frequently over several years before they eventually moved in together and got married. But after Molly's death, Blake learned the story from their first date was a lie. The car did not belong to her roommate, but to her husband, and though she did eventually tell him well into their relationship that she'd been married before, she never told him that she was still married when they met. Reading his memoir, though, you don't find out about these lies till later. The book starts with Molly's suicide, but then goes back in time to the beginning. We meet Blake, who's at that point terrified of love, going on stupid dates, getting even stupider drunk, then waking up to write all day while on the other side of the wall, his dad is dying of Alzheimer's. And we meet Molly, showing up from time to time at Blake's with a poem, or with a tupperware full of baked goods, and telling him even that very first night, "I love you." When I sat down with Blake to talk about his memoir, I wanted to know what initially brought them together. Here's our conversation.

Helena de Groot: What were some of the ways in which you immediately felt like you were similar?

Blake Butler: So, the similarities—you know, we both believed in writing as a serious pursuit, and we wanted to write not to the scene or the culture. We both kind of disdained a little bit of the literary culture that kind of panders. She in particular hated poetry to some degree, 'cause it's like if you're a woman reading at a reading in particular, you have to be funny or sexy or something. And it's just like, that's not what . . . To her, poetry was truth, and was her way out of her troubled youth. When she realized that someone could choose to be a poet, she was like, that's obviously the best job to choose you know? I would almost call it holy for her, even though she was an atheist. And we shared that intensity of, like, people that write to get money or fame or attention are just kind of pedestrians here, and we're trying to write for the long game. So, we came together over that, and we both kind of liked to talk trash about things that we didn't like in that way. And she had a really great sense of humor, and a really sharp tongue. So, we got along famously in that way. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: So she was funny. She just didn't want to do it on command for the likes or whatever.

Blake Butler: Yeah. Oh, she was hilarious. I mean, she had just a really great sense of humor, and there's jokes all throughout her poetry. But I think another thing about our similarities is that we both wrote dark work. So, like I think when you write dark work, people don't think you're—especially with poetry—it's like you can't laugh. It's like, "This is serious." So, we bonded over that darkness, and we bonded over the search of truth and not really paying attention to all the rest. And at the same time, we both, like . . . she would say, "I hate most fiction," "I hate most novels," even though her favorite book was Moby Dick. She would say, like, "Why write a novel? There's enough information in the world already." And I would push back at her, being like, "Poetry is so frivolous," you know? But I think we both respected—but it was, you know, two writers living together, you're going to have . . . well, I feel she was in competition with me at times, but I never really felt that with her. But there was a weird tension there. But she wouldn't always tell me what hurt her feelings, like she would—there would always be a seed in the back of her mind, even though we seem to be getting along, I think she would be like, well, "Blake still said that one thing, and I'm gonna remember that." She would hold things in her mind that way.

Helena de Groot: I feel like that's such a trauma thing, this kind of elephant memory.

Blake Butler: Right, yeah. Yeah, if you're a kid who's raised in a house where the people that give you food and take care of you also show up and do other things that hurt you, then like, why would you ever come clean with anybody? You have to know that you need a little place to keep yourself safe, and I think that she never gave that up, to the very end, even . . . Yeah, as close as we became, I always knew that there was something that she just couldn't accept about normalcy, in a way. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And what was your life like as writers? Were you each other’s first reader, or did you kind of keep your things close to the chest? Or what was the day-to-day nature of your writer's life with each other?

Blake Butler: Well, she was teaching always, and I was working from home always, so . . . She would find pockets of time to write in, but she wasn't the kind of person that needed to write every day necessarily. She would write in the mornings, or you know, she really liked to sit on the bed and like, be really comfortable and lay down and just like, find what was coming to her that day. Whereas I wrote every day, seven days a week, from getting up to whatever time I would wanna get up, like four or five.

Helena de Groot: Do you still?

Blake Butler: Uh, I write less now. I still spend a lot of time at my computer, but I've gotten more efficient. I think I used to just like, write with such abandon that I'd literally finish a book and then start another one the same day, almost, because I just . . . Like, when I met her, I was like, no woman is gonna get me off of my practice. Like, I will never let anyone get close enough to me that they will intercede on my writing life. But as we got closer and as we got married, I was like well, that's not how life really works you know. It's one thing to be writing at your parent's house and hiding from your Alzheimer's father who's like, saying weird stuff and knocking on the door, and another to make your own life at our house. So . . .

Helena de Groot: A life that you actually wanna be in. (LAUGHS)

Blake Butler: Right, yeah, a chosen life. Yeah. So, I think she respected my work ethic a lot, because her work was like the only real thing she trusted, because it was the only thing you could have proof of, I guess. So, she respected my work, but I think she also disdained, A), my ability to have that much time, because you know, she'd get up and leave and go to school and spend all day at school and come home, and I'd be sitting in the same place when she came back. And not always working on creative stuff, often working for money as well. But she would bring it up regularly, whereas she did not like that I never had to go into the world and deal with the stuff that she did. And, so, I think that started to be a bit of a chip on her shoulder. And then you know, she was mainly a poet. But before we even moved in, you know, when I met her, she was telling me stories about her childhood and her life with her family. And they were all these really crazy, rich stories, where I was like, you have to write a memoir. You have to write about your experience with your father, growing up with him and what that was like. And in the same way that she was like, "I didn't know you could be a poet," she was like, "I didn't know that you could just sit down and decide to do that." And, so, she wrote Bandit, her memoir, in basically three months. And it was, to her, done then, she wasn't . . . You know, I'm the kind of writer who writes a draft, and then I revise it probably 40 to 80 times from head to toe. And she finished that draft and was like, "What do I do with it now?" And I'm like, well, you could start revising it. And she's like, she'd spend a couple days doing that, and be like oh, I fixed the things I wanna fix. So, I think that spoke to her poetry you know, like the way she writes poetry. Pick a word and it's there.

Helena de Groot: That's so interesting, you know? It's exactly the opposite of what I thought her writing process was like. Because she's such a controlled writer, you know, like as you say, she picks a word and that is the word. But I didn't know that she picked it the first time round. I thought that this was like the work of years of meticulous honing and polishing. But no, this came out of her like that.

Blake Butler: Well. I think if you look at her work over time, there are phrases and segments and packets of words that she keeps trying to find places for. So, coming off of writing Bandit, she wrote two epic-length poems that were book-length right on the heels of that, and neither of those were published. And I saw her take those pieces and repurpose them into other poems and build. So, she's not a first-word, first-choice poet. But she had spent so much time, like, getting herself ready to write. And I just think she has so much intellect and knowledge in there that it came out like a stone would come out, and then she could, you know, put the stone into a scene or something like that. But I guess that's . . . (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: I love that it's such a good image. You're right. I think there's something so final about it, or like it could not be any other shape. I was wondering if maybe we can start with some of Bandit, since we're talking about it?

Blake Butler: Yeah. Great.

Helena de Groot: So, I was thinking maybe chapter two and three. Short chapters.

Blake Butler: Two and three, you wanted? OK.

"Dad robbed banks one summer. He robbed the Community Choice Credit Union on 13 Mile Road in Warren. He robbed the Warren Bank on 19. He robbed the NBD bank. He robbed the TCF Bank, where I would open my first checking account when I turned 17.

That's the one with the little baskets of dum-dums at each window, and the sour herb smell from the health food store next door. He robbed the Credit Union One. He robbed the Michigan First. He robbed the Comerica Bank on Eight Mile and Mound. That was as close as he got to the Detroit neighborhood he grew up in, Poletown. He robbed the Comerica Bank inside a Kroger on 12 Mile and Dequindre, all of the shoppers gliding by as dad passed a note to the teller in silence. This is a robbery, I have a gun. He robbed the Citizens State Bank on Hayes Road in Shelby Township. Afterward, the cops caught up with him, finally, at TJ's Golf Course on 23 Mile Road. They peeked into his parked car, a bag of money and his disguise in the back seat, plain as day. He was sitting at the bar, drinking a beer and eating a hot ham sandwich. I was 13 that summer. He went to prison for seven years after a lengthy trial, delayed by constant objections and rounds of him firing his public defenders. After his release, he lived a normal life for seven years and then robbed banks again."

"There. See? Done with the facts already. The facts are easy to say. I say them all the time. They leave me out. They cover over the trouble like a lid. This isn't about them. This is about whatever is cut from the frame of narrative. The fat remnants, broke bones, gristle, untender bits. Me and mom and my sister and him, the actual him, beyond the bandit version on the evening news. I see my little self there, under the stories. It's 1987 and I am set between my parents like a tape recorder. Dad on the couch, fixed to the TV. Mom leaning in from the kitchen. Me in between on the clumpy beige carpet with spelling worksheets. I am writing out the word "people," watching the words slip off of my pencil lead. But then I start listening so carefully that I cease to see what I'm doing. Mom is grumbling, "What do I know?" And "What is wrong with you?" again and again. And dad is talking over her steadily and laughing in a friendly way without taking his eyes off the game. More words are forming under my hand in an uneasy cursive. My sister, age nine, stomps through the scene and out the back door, slamming it for all of us. Mom and dad's voices rise, but are cut off at a strange cracking sound. We all turn to the picture window to see my sister smashing walnut-sized white decorative rocks from the neighbor's garden with a hammer on the concrete patio. She pulls the hammer as far above her shoulder as she can and brings it down on a rock, splitting it into dust and flying shards. Dad looks back to the TV. Mom rushes out the door, and now my sister hugs the weapon to her chest. Mom appears and rips it away from her. I am recording this so carefully that I don't see it while it is happening. At the dinner table, I am watching my parents' simmering volley crescendo, from pissy fork drops, to plate slams, to stomps off and squeals away. My sister biting into the cruel talk just to feel included. Me, just watching as if on the living room side of a television screen. I could see them, but they could definitely not see me. I squashed my wet veggies around on my plate, eyes fixed to their drama exactly as I'd do in front of Scooby-Doo or G.I. Joe. I could sleep, I could squirm off, I could hum, dance, or even talk, safe in their blind spot. I could write, I discovered, and no one could hear me."

Helena de Groot: Thank you.

Blake Butler: Sweet, sweet baby, sweet child Molly. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: I know right? This image, also, of "I sit between my parents like a tape recorder." Yeah. It's so good.

Blake Butler: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: I mean, it's a very cute image. You just see this squat tape recorder, but, like, it's sad too, right? Like the way that she's always recording and seeing everything, and hearing, and not being seen or heard.

Blake Butler: And inanimate and not attended to as a human. Yeah, she describes her early childhood as feeling like a creature, which—when I heard that word, I was like, that's not . . . A child shouldn't be made to feel like a creature and, you know, to not know who's gonna help them, or who's, you know.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. In your book, Molly, you do see and hear her, or like the whole project of the book—I mean, I don't wanna narrow it down to one project, but one project of the book really seems to be kind of subverting that expectation that she has, of not being seen and not being heard, and being like, "Molly, I have been looking. I have been paying attention to you." And I was just wondering, is there a scene from the book where you feel like you saw something about Molly that you loved, that kind of still breaks you open with tenderness for her, or admiration or something. You know, joy . . . Is there a scene that you're thinking of?

Blake Butler: (LAUGHS) Umm . . . Oh, here we go, here we go. "One afternoon, from what seemed out of nowhere, Molly offered me a gift. A tiny, battered, pale blue on dark blue patterned Avon box with a gold bottom and two textured stickers of fluffy cats with long whiskers stuck to the lid. Inside, a tuft of stuffing, on which sat two ivory dice, small as the tip of a pinky. She had carried this box around with her since a young girl. She wasn't sure why. She didn't keep a lot of stuff. Now, she wanted me to have it. It felt like being let into a dim gray room with many doors behind, most of which I still had no idea, besides the smallest sounds that might leak through. A hum of bees, maybe. A silent glint of sunlight against some sea. The low, slow beating of a heart. A little signal sent from somewhere secret laced inside her. Just a girl. Sometimes when I'm uncertain what to do, I take the dice out and roll them, read the numbers. Just now, two, one. I find I feel some simple comfort in the surprise of never quite knowing what it might mean, far beyond the limits of what I might imagine I do know."

Helena de Groot: Thank you. Yeah. It's so sweet, right? Like the image of her carrying that box around with her, in what seemed a little bit like a chaotic life, sort of logistically, right?

Blake Butler: Right. Well, and yeah, so I mentioned there that she didn't have much stuff. I mean, she—you know, that was another huge difference, because I was a sentimental almost hoarder, and so was my mom. And I had, you know, 40 years of stuff between my parents' house and my house. And she–she could fit all her stuff. She hardly had anything, you know. She had little mementos, knickknacks and things like that, but she didn't have . . . even her pictures that she had of her family were small in number and just scattered in the bottom desk of her drawer. She had this school desk that she had, [it] was one of the only pieces of furniture she had with her, and it was just full of like child junk that she had kept with her, but it was not organized, and it was just like sifting through a sand pile. And so, and a lot of that, she said, had been thrown out by her mother, or some of her stuff. And I think that's why she hated sentimentality and things like that, because it just reminded her of what she didn't have. So when she . . . Yeah, her giving it to me then it was so unexpected you know? And I do think that there's a wounded girl in her there that, like, doesn't grow up.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Yeah. Because there's also one scene in the book where, after her death, her mother brings a photo album of pictures that she has of Molly throughout the years. Can you remember that?

Blake Butler: Yeah. They came over during the wake, and I didn't really want them to, because I wasn't sure how to feel about it. You know, I'd spent all my time with her hearing about how they had kind of not been there for her, and how she had had to make up for them, and she had tried to keep the relationships, because she did want to have a relationship with her mother, but it was fraught. So, when they came over, and I was just trying to . . . I mean, I was like out of my mind with grief at the time. But when they came over, I went into, like, professional mode, and I just tried to do what I could to bridge the gap there. But I really felt, you know, I really felt a taste of the noise that we're describing of her childhood, where I didn't feel like I was getting to be heard or even talk about what happened. There wasn't a, like, what happened here. There wasn't a lot of questions. It was just more this just raw grief. And so yeah, when the photo book came out, I think it was meant to alleviate that, "Oh, well at least we can look at our pictures of sweet Molly." But yeah, it's like, I don't want to give it dimensions, but it was like not even every page had all the slots filled in, and it just made me feel worse to see that and to see the little girl trapped in those pictures. It felt . . . It just made me really realize the difference between us, that she had done a lot of work, I realized, to hide. Even though her disdain for the childhood I had came out more as I, when my mom died, I started bringing all that stuff home. Then I started to see, "Oh, wow. She really gets in a certain way when this stuff comes out." And so I had to start dancing around, you know.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, because that is a really harrowing scene in your book when, as you said, your mother, your hero, has just died, you've just had the funeral. And then Molly's mother, her name is Nora, is there for it. Right.

Blake Butler: "Back at home, right after the funeral, Molly immediately returned to decorating cookies, and Nora stuck around to putting herself to work by doing random chores around the house, trying to help, while I went into our bedroom to lie down.

After a while, Molly came in and said, Nora wanted me to come into the living room and let her do a guided meditation for spiritual healing. Just the two of us. Though I had explained already multiple times how all I wanted to do was be in bed, maybe I'd change my mind, Nora told Molly to tell me, and she'd be right here if I did, refusing to take no for an answer, much less a hint. Feeling the pressure, and with zero tact on Molly's end to intercede but as a messenger, I snapped and told Molly I wasn't going to do it, that I had no will. Wasn't it obvious that I wouldn't wanna meditate right now? How many ways would I have to say it before it stuck? Fine, Molly said, cold as a stone, and went out to inform Nora and take her back to her hotel. For a while the house went silent, far away, hot pools of acid in my body, buzzing and unfurling underneath the numbness. I wished that I could be held, hugged, allowed to cry. But instead time kept passing on as on a treadmill with little room to mourn, much less be solaced. Once she got back, I approached Molly at her work table in the kitchen, already intently refocused on her icing. "You're such a selfish piece of shit," she screamed back, soon as I spoke, back turned, tool in hand, refusing to hear anything I had to say, that it wasn't that I didn't like her mother, but that I missed mine, that we were both on the same side, or we were supposed to be. That if I couldn't take care of myself today, of all days, when would I ever? In return, Molly took my fire and fed it sarcastically right back, saying she knew my mom was a saint and hers was trash, OK? Nora had been like this her whole life, unable or unwilling to think of how others felt in times of need, and that was her problem, not mine. "Isn't that right? Right, you motherfucker?" Having said her piece, beyond retort, she said she had to work now and I should fuck off and go away. A line in the sand, of sorts, I realized, standing there in shock over how this day of all days had become twisted. I felt maybe as small as Molly had herself once, quite long ago, having grown up immersed in this irrational, unbending form of love, or whatever else filled in where love might have, where it didn't matter what you felt, and all you had left to soothe yourself was your own arms."

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I mean, the gaping loneliness between the two of you throughout this book, really, you know, it's . . . Yeah, it's harrowing. And her cruelty and coldness are really hard to square with like what happened at the funeral, just hours earlier, where she's imploring people to check out your mother's quilts, to take time to admire the composition, the textiles, textures, how they were meant to be examined from up close, handled and felt . . . Like, she knows what you need in that moment. And then, hours later, it goes out the window. And I'm just wondering, while you were writing this book, how did you see your job in terms of doing something with these irreconcilable Mollies?

Blake Butler: Yeah. Good question. I mean, so, at first, I was just trying to understand what had happened, because she killed herself and left a note. But the note . . . Well, at first, I thought the note was the reason. You know, the note explains that she doesn't feel she has a place in the world, and she doesn't like people, and doesn't wanna be one.

And in the end she says work doesn't save her. Any accomplishment goes in one ear and out the other to her. And you know, in grief, I almost became a detective, trying to figure out what I could find that would give me more information about what had happened. Because it's like, I want an explanation. I want something to give context to, why today, why this? And, so, I don't discover some of the duplicities until I start going into her phone to try to get the pictures out for funeral purposes. And then you know, I find pictures in there of people that I don't know, and of her doing things. And so that changed everything. Because before that, it didn't make much sense, even though she had been suicidal her whole life, I didn't understand why now you know, I thought we had been improving and getting better. So, the process of writing is kind of like finding anything that has a basis for fact. I don't even wanna say it's a fact, because everything is so multi-dimensional. So, as you start, like putting those facts down, you're like, "Oh, now I remember this, because of that, or . . ." And also, she'd been journaling since she was 10, old enough to write. So, I have her journals, and I have her poetry, and I have my experience, and when I discovered the phone pictures, I started reading her emails. And each of them tells a different story of her.

Helena de Groot: And these phone pictures—just for people who haven't read the book and haven't, bless their hearts, gone online—they're sexting, kind of situation, right?

Blake Butler: Yeah, yeah. Having affairs, having e-relationships, sexting relationships, whatever. Yeah, so I find pictures of her wearing underwear I've never seen, and I find pictures of men, naked, sending back to her, and videos. And so, I mean like, on one hand, it's soul-breaking. But it also gave me some path to finding the answer. Because she's telling me about how she's living her life. She's telling me, "I'm going to therapy." She's not going to therapy. She stops going to therapy. I find that out reading her journal. So, I have to kind of, like, I have my memory of our relationship, and each thing that I find that way recontextualizes the entire relationship. So really, it feels like quicksand writing this book. And, you know, so it begins out of trying to figure out the truth and being, I was really angry. I felt the world pushed her over the ledge there at the end and . . .

Helena de Groot: How?

Blake Butler: Well, multifaceted. Her academic career—she had been teaching at a small technical school that got bought out by a much larger school, and the whole point of that school, in my view, was trying to become a Division 1 school, to have a football team, because they wanted to make money. And she got a new boss, who had never had administrative or teaching experience and ran off half the department. And Molly doesn't just stick—you know, I was like you have a bad boss, just teach your class, come home and try to get through it. And she refused to do that. She wanted to fight and say "This isn't right," and she became a target. She had a target on her back. So, I really think academia is one I was aware of throughout. But, yeah, finding these men that she's seeing, there's one in particular at the end who is threatening to expose her for that, and threatening to drag her name and to show up at our door and calling her names and telling her he's going to kill himself and all this stuff. And she literally buys the gun that she kills herself with the day after this guy kind of, like, they have their falling out. And he leaves it with, "I'm a victim here." And her last email to him—you know, there's a 90-page email thread, 70 of which are him and 20 of which are her, and the last few are like, "Stop this. Stop what you're doing, stop hurting me. This isn't what we began as, and I no longer even care." Like, "I just want to die now," that's kind of the last email she sends him. And, yeah, she goes out the next day and buys a gun. So, I could make a really long list of people, you know, I want to point fingers at all kinds of people, and I want to point at myself too. Finding out this happened, it makes you, how can you not go back and say, "Ah, how did I not see this then? How did I not stand up for myself there? How did I not question her about this?" And I see everyone as complicit in her in that. The poetry world too, like her poems getting rejected, her books getting rejected, her struggle there—she's just, everything's a struggle. And part of it's because she's wearing this collar around her neck, but the other part of it is that it just really felt like we couldn't stop taking it on the nose. Both of us, you know?

Helena de Groot: Yeah. And part of what I was wondering about as I was reading—you go, as you say, be a detective after she dies, and find all this stuff that contradicts or contextualizes things that you remember, and there's trapdoor after trapdoor. And I was wondering, like what that does to your confidence as a writer, right? Because like you think that you can perceive things, and that you notice things, and . . . know.

Blake Butler: Honestly, I don't know how I wrote it. Honestly, it really became like waking up and going to volunteer to be in a torture chamber on a daily basis. Because yeah, in order to be able to write and to be in these memories, you have to go back to them and immerse yourself in them. And so, yeah, there's a lot of like things in this that I couldn't see because of how difficult it was to say anything true. And I'm questioning myself the whole time. Do I even have—I'm a man writing about a woman's sex life. Even though it is our relationship that I'm talking about, I felt really screwed up by that and I had to go to people and be like, "Am I allowed—can I do this? Is this OK?" And even though they told me yes, it still is torturous. And to have to witness her pain over and over again that way, watching what she did to herself—and I described those emails she has with this guy, like, I read all of those emails. I saw videos of her, and I couldn't stop myself, because I was in such a horrible state of emotions . . . But I found a way by just finding certain paragraphs, and got locked on, like, at least I know this is true, and like building it out that way. But it really did a number on my self-esteem, and I didn't write fiction at all during those three years, or when I did, I thought, I'm crazy now. I'm never going to be able to write again. And I've had to do a lot of work to figure out how I can. And I have figured, I've made progress on that. But my self-confidence took a hit from her, and from the writing, and yeah, from the book being rejected when it first went out. I thought, I've given everything I possibly can to write this, and I know that it's a complex and confusing book to read, but also if someone doesn't want to hear this from me, I don't want to ever talk again. So, if I have to eat this book, I'm done. On multiple levels, I thought that. But as soon as I turned the book in and I didn't have to edit those words anymore, it changed. But like yeah, when I published excerpts and they would send me—the magazine would have excerpts, I would go right back into that state of, like, pulling my hair out, screaming. My wife that I live with now who was there while I was writing this, she would just hear me screaming and pounding on the desk upstairs, and she stood by me through that, because she knew why I was doing it, but I know it was hard for her to hear that, and it took a big toll on my daily life for that whole time. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Can you tell me about your relationship to this, like, pile of documentary evidence? Because—I don't want to go into this because Twitter makes me mad—but like, you know, people on Twitter had opinions about the things that you decided to include and not include, and those opinions were high on outrage and low on actually having read the book. So, I don't think we need to spend too much time on that. But I am, myself, interested in how you navigate that question of what to include. And especially like—on the one hand you have this pile of evidence, right? Like as you said earlier, you discovered, after her death, when she actually was married and got divorced, right? Like, that's records that you found when she was already dead. You started reading her journals, which as a good partner, you hadn't done. I mean, a little bit in the beginning, but then you sort of fought that out and got over it, and then didn't breach her trust anymore.

Blake Butler: Right.

Helena de Groot: Also, something that you chastised yourself for, because had you only breached her trust and read those journals, you know, she was clear as day that she was thinking of killing herself. So anyway, you have this pile of documentary evidence. You have this gaping hole in your self-confidence, because all these revelations have made you doubt what is real and what can you know, and is anything that I've ever thought is real, is that real? So how do you then navigate what to include in your book?

Blake Butler: Yeah, it's a good question, because some of the most hurtful things she did aren't in the book, and that came from protecting the people that she was involved with in that way. I wanted to include enough that I could make the point that I needed to make, you know? The emails with the person she's seeing, those felt pertinent to me, because the way that connects to her choosing to buy the gun is very apparent to me. I'm not trying to shame anyone—well, I don't know, the guy is another story—but I'm not trying to shame her for that. Adultery is a more of an easy thing to get over than all the other things. Early on—it's a shock, but like, adultery happens. But this cost her her life is the real question for me. So, I don't know. I tried to not be just like prurient or navel-gazing about it and just to choose the things that really had purpose, to help us understand who she was, what she went through, why she died, and what's left of that world. Because I'm trying to bring into the light things that have become so toxic that they're almost mutant, you know? So, there's no firm definition, and I went back and forth, you know. I pulled . . . I avoided writing about the adultery for a long time. It wasn't in the original draft, and even in the draft here, it's like asking if it's OK, and I just realized like, you can't understand it without these components. And so that's truth and . . . Well, here's the other thing about it, is like, Molly wouldn't want to be wrapped up in this tight bow and package. Like, I've spoken a few times to her ex-husband. He told me, "People are going to come up to you, now that Molly's dead, and say she was just, Molly was just the sweetest person. She was the best." And Molly would laugh in those people's faces. She was not the sweetest person. She didn't want to be the sweetest person, and she wasn't living by other people's morals either. So, I think people that see this content and assume that it's malicious on my part are really underestimating both me but more importantly, Molly. They're underestimating the complex wild entity of energy and creativity and madness. And I find that beautiful about her. That's what attracted me to her, and though it took me damage, I don't look at those things and say, what a piece of garbage.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Blake Butler: And one of the main reasons I wrote the book was because I think, as a society, we're afraid to talk about death, and especially suicide and mourning, complex mourning like this. So, if I can step up there and say it is okay to talk about this, and you should, because it's going to eat you alive if you don't, like, I don't know how you could go through what I went through, and be a writer, and not write. What was I supposed to do, write like a horror book? Or like, you know, it's like, this is something that has to be reckoned with, and not everyone can do that. And I'm specially equipped to do that as a writer and a person who lived with a writer, and I know Molly understands it, and I know that she wanted me to do it. I really do know that she wanted me to do it.

Helena de Groot: Did you ever talk about that with Molly, like, just in the hypothetical, or I don't know, like, "What if we ever write about each other?" Did you ever talk about that?

Blake Butler: So, there's a scene in the book where she says, "I'm going to write a book about what it's like to live with you."

Helena de Groot: Yeah, My Novelist. (Laughs).

Blake Butler:My Novelist. Yeah, and she said it in kind of, like, a fun way, but I was—I mean, I have a lot of irritating habits. I make a lot of noise. I, you know, blah, blah, blah. But I was like, I would love for you to do that, because I'd love to be able to see myself through your eyes. And she was a person that taught memoir and taught poetry, and I sat in workshops with her where she told people, "Your story belongs to you, and it's not only your right to write it, but it's your duty." And so how else can I, you know—she lays all the information out. She tells me that she's going to write a book about me. She says in so many words that everyone should do that, and so like, I think she wanted to be known more than anything, and she wanted people to be able to hear her.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, it's interesting, right? Like, to go back to her sitting like a tape recorder between her parents, this thing that is ignored, but records and sees everything. And in a way, she's been recording her own life in her journals, in her memoir to a certain degree. How far would you go in saying that she asked you or wanted you to do this, to see her, to make that record of her?

Blake Butler: She didn't say it literally.

Helena de Groot: No.

Blake Butler: But she was a writer and she wrote—so Bandit's a good example. She asked all of her family members about the book. She wanted their opinions. Her grandmother said, "Why don't you wait till everyone's dead to write this book," you know? And Molly said, "I can't do that. I have to tell my story now." So, I trust that, you know? I trust the instinct there. And I think she trusted me in that way too. Though we were different, she did respect me in that way, and I almost think she chose me for that reason, to some degree. Because it's like, she had lived a life that went obscured under all of its own information, sort of. And like, I feel like she saw me as a writer who was unafraid to write about darkness. And because I was like, what's attracting you to me? I'm not like the guys you normally date, but I'm nice, I'm inviting, I think more than I should about things. And I think she like saw that. I almost think she picked me, in a way, for that reason. I'll never say it's because she said it literally, because she didn't, but that would be—how could she have told me literally? Like, "Hey, I'm going to kill myself, so write a book about me when I do it." You know, she did everything else but say that. And on the other hand, I'm an artist. So, it's a story that must be told, to me, and so like, I'm going to do it in a way that feels validated. The last thing I would want to do would [be to] write a book about her where she would look down and say, "You buried me." I would never do that to her. I loved her too much and I still do, you know?

Helena de Groot: Yeah. There's a really chilling passage in your book about the last picture you have of yourself before her suicide and I was wondering if you can read that. One last thing that I want to say before you read is that this scene is after your mother died, and your father has already died, and so you're cleaning out your childhood home to put it on the market.

Blake Butler: "The last picture I have of myself before my life changed is of my reflection in the bathroom mirror in what had been my bedroom throughout high school. Before it became mine after remodeling, it was the master, possibly even the same room where I'd been conceived. After I moved out, it became my mother's workspace, where she'd spend hours sketching designs and dyeing fabric for her quilts, singing along to Arlo Guthrie and Willie Nelson, still partly audible in my memory even now. From here, it might even appear, I have some sense of what's to come for me tomorrow, that somehow I'm aware of the beginning of the end. Molly would mention that a few times throughout her journals during those last weeks. "I think he knows," as if the expression on my face should seal her fate without a word, but he doesn't know. He has no idea, not about Molly, not about reality, not about himself. He's at the end of his rope. The picture reminds me in a way I could never on my own, hoping for more but knowing better, so he thinks. Maybe he can even feel how close he is to the edge, teetering blindly without a clue of how deep the hole will go, fearing the loss of control, with only conceptual sense that when it hits his world, will never be the same. I really only recognize him now as someone else. Maybe my brother, for whom I wish I could intercede and take his place. In a way that I could never care for my present self, I feel for him. His glare, his posture, mostly defeated but still there, much like a ghost, going through the motions to do his duty, carrying a chaos in his head. The next photo I would take tomorrow is of the business card of the detective assigned to Molly's case so I wouldn't lose it.

Helena de Groot: I mean, what I thought was so interesting in this excerpt is this shift to third person. So, you're looking in the mirror in your childhood bedroom—"From here, it might even appear I have some sense of what's to come for me tomorrow"—and then you skip to Molly's journals that she writes, "I think he knows." And then you skip into third person: "But he doesn't know, he has no idea. Not about Molly, not about reality, not about himself." And then you write, "I really only recognize him now as someone else, maybe my brother, for whom I wish I could intercede and take his place." How did you find your way back to yourself?

Blake Butler: (LAUGHS) I think I'm still finding my way back to myself. I mean, yeah. The process of kind of figuring out what happened to me, which is what this book does, was necessary for my recovery, because I just remember in the early days after laying there and being like, "I'll never get back to where I was, so why would I keep trying," you know? But then I realized later, it's like, "Well, yeah, you can't get back to where you were, but you can get to somewhere extended from that." And so it's a lot of therapy, a lot of forcing myself to face this stuff and really unpack it and figure out why it affected me the way it did, and how I can take care of myself better, because I've never been a person to take care of myself that well, and also not asking for help, you know? I've always just kind of carried it on my back, and maybe that's another similarity of Molly and I that is different. Because on one hand, it looks like we're not the same, because our home lives are so different. But it's almost like I chose to do that, and she had no choice. And so I'm trying to just . . . In kind of sifting through the memories and finding the bad ones and understanding why they happened, I'm feeling like I can reclaim some of my lost what—it's like my entire 30s felt for a while like they had been gone, because while I was living a lie, and nothing was real, is what I thought. But that's not true. It was real. And there were lies there, but what we had, it doesn't fit into words that way, and that's why it's so complicated. So yeah, just trying to be less reactionary to my own feelings, I guess.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I also want to know as a writer, just, almost like as technical as you can answer this question, nuts and bolts is what I mean, how did you approach writing about just having met Molly, early days with Molly, you know, relationship with Molly, just like joyful moments with Molly. How did you approach writing about this, knowing what you came to find out in the end? How did you put yourself back in the place of this man who was so thoroughly alien to you now?

Blake Butler: It was really confusing, because I look back and say, you know, now that it's clear where there are moments where I'm being misled or taken advantage of or lied to, and it seems transparent on the page, because I've figured it out and I wrote it that way. But at the time, it didn't seem that way. Molly seemed like the most mature, together, motivated, accomplished, inspiring person I'd ever met. She was a force, and so I just thought, I can't—I thought she was perfect, almost. I was like, I can't criticize this person, because I'm usually wrong. And like, now I realize that's manipulative work being done on her part, but it even still doesn't take away from me what I loved about her. And like, people are messed-up, and complicated, especially writers and poets. And like I said, I knew that about her from day one, and I loved her more for not falling into those things. So, while it's confusing to see me doing things I wouldn't do now, or loving someone that doesn't take care of me, and weirdly, on the other side of all these people criticizing me for writing the book, there's other women who are like, "Where's the rage in this book? Why didn't you push back more?" And I'm like, I want to push back on that idea too, because Molly's complicated! and she deserves love—and I thought I could be that person. So, like, even though I didn't know she was cheating or twisting things, I did know she had problems and was complicated and I lived with that. and I chose to live with that. And I was grateful that she lived with my problems, you know. I'm no easy person to be around either. So going back to the beginning of when we met, it feels nice. It feels sweet. And even though it's fraught, it's like, we were just both trying to find our path, you know? We were just trying to find someone that did care, and we did. And I've had to question whether Molly really loved me through all this. But I think she loved me. I don't know, I know I loved herm and so that's what . . . Love is worth more than strife, you know. So, if I have to eat strife with what was to me a true love, and the love of my life at that time, you know, that's worth it, and I'm going to do it. I'll do it again and I'll jump into another one if I feel the same way. Maybe not with such abandon, now that I've had therapists help me but . . . (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: When you came in, you told me very briefly that you met someone, at the last moment that you thought that this would ever happen. Would you feel comfortable talking about that or,

Blake Butler: Sure.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Just, can you tell me about meeting your current wife, and like, how her love is changing you?

Blake Butler: So, Megan, Megan is my wife now. I've known her for about ten years. She was married to someone else when I first met her, and she's a writer also. I've always liked her writing, and when Molly died, I spent a lot of time talking to anyone that would talk to me, and especially people that had suicide experience, which I knew Megan did. Megan understood the darkness that could lead someone to choose to take their life, and she also understood how it feels to live past that. So, I felt safe with her and I felt—the conversation began with that, but then as we talked more and more, what became the conversation wasn't Molly but the mystery of the universe and the mystery of life, and I just started—in a place where I thought joy could never return, I felt . . . I want to call it a miracle, because I was planning to—and this partially, I was stopped from making a much worse scene out of myself because of Covid, I couldn't go anywhere—my idea was like, I'm going to get my car and go apeshit and do stupid shit and just have weird relationships and I don't care what happens to me. And I realized I didn't want that when this person showed up who, when we went to meet up for the first time, it was obvious from the second she got out of her car that I was like, I never want to be apart from this person. And I had never really felt that in any relationship, even Molly. I was the kind of person that, we'd go on a date and I'll see you in a week or two, and it was just obvious. I asked Megan to marry me almost immediately, and we didn't do it for another year because we—it was obviously like, well, I'm in a messed up state of mind—but the more time passed, the more true it was. So, I can't explain it, all I can say is that it felt like the person I'd been looking for showed up when I was about to die, you know? And she's been there with me throughout this. She has watched me write this book. She has listened to me talk about my ex-wife—well, is your dead wife your ex-wife? I'm not really sure—but that understanding has never faltered. And where Molly would get negative on things, really the only thing Megan and I fight about is my own attitude. You know, she accepts me as I am. She accepts me for my faults and she wants me to feel love. And like, I don't know what Molly wanted from me, I really don't. So, to be able to for the first time say, "I choose this," and have it be right and have it reveal itself as right in the way it makes my life livable, it's awestruck me. It's nothing I've ever experienced before.

Helena de Groot: Blake Butler is the author of Molly, a memoir about his life with the poet Molly Brodak. He also wrote several novels, including Alice Knott, 300,000,00, There Is No Year, and Scorch Atlas, as well as a previous memoir titled Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia. He is a founding editor of the, now sadly defunct, but long-standing literary blog HTMLGIANT.

Molly Brodak was the author of the poetry collection A Little Middle of the Night, which won the Iowa Poetry Prize; a memoir, Bandit: A Daughter's Memoir; and three chapbooks of poetry. Her last collection, The Cipher, published posthumously, won the Pleiades Press Editors' Prize. Before her death in 2020, she taught writing and literature at Emory University, Savannah College of Art and Design, and Georgia College and State University, among others, and received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. The music in this episode is by Blue Dot Sessions. I'm Helena de Groot and this was Poetry Off the Shelf. Thank you for listening.