ATLANTA, GEORGIA: Poet, writer and baker, Molly Brodak, was only 39 years old when she took her own life on March 8, 2020, in Atlanta, Georgia, after being diagnosed with a brain tumor.
"My partner Molly Brodak passed away yesterday. I don't know how else to tell it," Brodak's heartbroken husband, Blake Butler, wrote on X (formerly Twitter) at the time.
Nearly three years after Brodak's death, Butler revealed the tragic final hours of his beloved wife's life in his new book, simply titled 'Molly'.
In his new book, Butler also included the haunting final diary entry of his wife.
"Took a bath, said goodbye to my body. We ate grilled halloumi and made love after dinner and watched our favorite things on TV," Brodak wrote in her last entry, as per an excerpt of Butler's book, previewed by the LA Times.
"Feel like I can see everything with such clarity this morning. I've been pretending my entire life," she reportedly wrote, the book mentioned.
Molly Brodak taped suicide note on the front door for her husband
As per the LA Times, Butler shared the gruesome details of Brodak's death in his new book. While it remains unknown how the 'Great American Baking Show' star took her own life, Butler said she had been "grappling with mental illness and a lifetime of trauma."
Butler reportedly shared Brodak's manner of suicide in detail in his book but the publication decided to leave out the details from their preview.
However, the outlet reported that Butler found Brodak's suicide note taped to their front door for him to see on his way back from a run.
"Leaving it all out for me to find like that," Butler wrote, adding, "How she'd made sure I'd be the one to go and find her body, was another kind of violence on its own."
Blake Butler detailed Molly Brodak's lifelong struggles in his book
In his heartwrenching tribute to his wife, Butler also delved into Brodak's lifelong struggle with trauma and mental health issues.
He opened up about Brodak's troubled nature, stemming from a history of depression dating back to her childhood. From the very outset of his book, he weighed in on how the issues continued to be a part of her life even when they met.
As per Brodak's memoir, 'Bandit', she was born in Detroit in 1980, and grew up in Rochester, Michigan. Her mother was a therapist while her father worked for General Motors.
Brodak was just 13 years old when father, Joseph Brodak, was sent to prison in 1994 for his role in a string of bank robberies in and around Detroit.
It was revealed that he decided to carry out heists on 11 banks in the area as he was struggling to pay off gambling debts.
The incident shattered Brodak's otherwise ordinary childhood. While Joseph was released in 2001 after being jailed for seven years, he served another prison sentence for robbing more banks in 2009.
In his book, 'Molly', Butler recalled the time he met Brodak for the first time in 2010. "Molly was troubled — that was clear," Butler wrote.
He also remembered Brodak's morbid fascination with death. "Even if you want to be dead inside, I would still kiss your dead eyes," she once wrote to him.
"Death always seemed to be on Molly's mind," Butler mentioned. "At times I sensed a part of her long locked up without a key, its entombed voice egging her on with grim ideas," he added.
While Butler highlighted Brodak's final journals, poems, emails and social media posts in his book, he also traveled back to the beginning of her life, looking at the lists Brodak created as a little girl.
Blake Butler was consumed by grief in the aftermath of Molly Brodak's death
In addition to writing on the final moments of Brodak's life, Butler also shed light into his own condition after the tragic death of his wife.
"Any effort I might make to stay alive felt at once compulsory and impossible, like all there'd ever be left to expect at best was treading neck-deep in blood that looked like water, with a black bag over my head, its fabric lined with mural-style dioramas of the scene of Molly's suicide inscribed into them, interlaced with miles of smoke," Butler wrote.
He then decided to use writing the book as a moment of catharsis while going through different stages of grief, including shock, devastation, and anger.
Butler channeled the pain and suffering of a grieving lover while going through his wife's childhood diaries, lists, gifts and unpublished writings.
However, doing so prompted Butler to meet demons of his own, including his habit of drinking alcohol. He even contemplated ending his own life in order to be reunited with his partner.
"The only way for me to complete this book is to kill myself," he wrote at one point.
An obituary published through the New York Times mentioned how Brodak "left behind many more poems" and how she sent Butler a book called 'Folk Physics' on the day she died.
He has reportedly planned to publish Brodak's poems posthumously. During Brodak's memorial service, Butler also shared how he wrote some 40 poems, one for every year of his wife's life, and planned to give it to her on her 40th birthday.
In his new book, Butler recalled how he penned "sun-yellow notebook full of forty poems, one for each year of her life, which I'd been working on for months as a surprise for her next birthday, just weeks away."
"...If only I'd given them to her earlier, I imagined, I might not be up here reading them aloud as for her ghost," he wrote.
As per the LA Times, while Butler may not have known "how to tell" Brodak's story at the beginning and wished to have told it sooner, his book, 'Molly', also says how even the black hole of grief can blossom into something meaningful, in the eye of the right beholder.
