From his hotel room in downtown Atlanta, Blake Butler could almost see the field where his late wife, the poet Molly Brodak, shot and killed herself in March 2020. “Every time I’ve come here since, I’ve driven to our old house. I’ve driven past where she did it, every time I’ve driven out of the airport here,” he tells me. “But this time I didn’t do that.” Butler, a writer specializing in grim, hallucinatory fiction, was back in Atlanta to promote his new memoir, Molly. It chronicles Butler and Brodak’s sometimes troubled, sometimes totally ordinary romance, their marriage, and the devastating discoveries he made after her death.

“I discovered Molly had been unfaithful in our marriage five days after her death, while looking through her phone for photos to include in the slideshow at her funeral,” Butler writes in the book of the moment he discovered sexually explicit photos and videos Brodak had exchanged with other men. After searching her journals, emails, receipts, and social media accounts, Butler claims in the memoir that he discovered she’d had sexual relationships with some of her students at the universities where she taught, one just weeks after they were married.

She’d regularly peruse dating apps and meet up with men when Butler was out of town, he writes. She lent around $1500 of Butler’s own money to one lover, another writer whose deeply dysfunctional entanglement with Brodak Butler believes caused her great distress. “Stunned into an earth-splitting sort of silence, I went and locked myself inside our bathroom with her laptop,” he writes. “Unable quite yet to understand what I was seeing, what it meant. This couldn’t really be what I imagined.”

In Molly, Butler recounts the grueling journey of a man grappling with unspeakable grief. It opens with a disquieting account of the day Brodak killed herself, beginning with quotidian details: Butler in his office writing, Brodak lying in bed, working on her laptop. Later, when Butler returns from a run, he finds Brodak’s suicide note inside a white envelope affixed to their front door, leading him to a horrific discovery.

From there, he revisits the couple’s relationship, identifying early signs of discordance between the two. Brodak had still been married when she started dating Butler. He believes she was a serial shoplifter and notes an incident where he found another man in her bed, sending Butler into a rage. Butler also exposes his own issues, recalling his struggles with alcohol, gambling, anger, and an instance of infidelity early in their relationship, ultimately writing through the peaks and valleys of their connection, their professional lives as writers and Brodak’s burgeoning career as a baker.

When Molly was initially published in early December 2023, Archway Editions sold out of the initial 5,000 copies in 11 days and had to reprint the book to meet demand. The book polarized readers, earning favorable reviews in The New Yorker and the Los Angeles Times. But it was also subject to a kind of buzz-building unique to our very specific media environment, in which a relatively obscure memoir can be strip-mined for shock value by an outlet like The Daily Mail, which ran a story emphasizing Brodak’s infidelity and labeling her a “serial cheater.” The book became a lightning rod for intense online debates around authorial responsibility, what should and shouldn’t be shared, even by a spouse, about someone without their consent, and the implication of the contents of our phones and computers being fair game to publish. Some saw courage in Butler’s telling of his story, in his attempt to bridge the gap between who he thought Brodak was and who he discovered her to be, in his will to carry on and keep living. Others saw a gross violation of Brodak’s memory, of her trust and privacy.

But the discussion around Molly has failed to grasp its total power and appeal: that it manages to be a meditation on the mystifying nature of love, a monumental tribute to a complicated person Butler clearly cared for deeply, while also raising profound and troubling questions about disclosure in art.

Several weeks after Brodak’s death in 2020, with all those grim revelations gnawing at him, Butler went on a run, a daily ritual that had been suspended since the suicide. “I remember running for the first time again and something just came over me and I was talking out loud. It felt like I was talking directly to Molly, and I said, ‘I’m going to write the best book I’ve ever written and it will be for you and it will be about you,’” Butler recalls. “And that made sense to me. I wasn’t going to just write another novel.”

Some of the book’s harshest critics have come from Brodak and Butler’s social set. Novelist Sarah Rose Etter, who drove Butler to Brodak’s funeral, called the book “literary revenge porn” and went on to claim Butler himself had been unfaithful to Brodak. Butler does write about his own infidelity, a onetime occurrence that happened early in his relationship with Brodak, in the book.

“While I remain deeply concerned about the ethical issues surrounding this project and what it has done to Molly’s legacy as a writer, I’m not interested in generating any further publicity or sales for this book,” Etter told Vanity Fair in a statement.

A few weeks later, Butler chalks up Etter’s response to “trying to gain glory and be the one who pointed the finger. It’s a common thing that people have done in the last five years: ‘Let’s pile on this person because I’m a hero and he’s a bad, evil man,’ or whatever,” he says. “I just think she has it out for me.”

“I had no choice but to write this book. I think Molly wanted me to write this book. And I think the only way to write this book is to tell the whole truth, to the extent that I can. And you know what? I didn’t put all the gory details in there,” Butler says. “There are things I didn’t share because I thought they would hurt the other people involved. But I felt in order to understand her decision and the position she was in, you have to understand what was going on in her life. So to me, the question of whether you can put someone’s private stuff into a book is really just the question of, can you write the book at all?”

In the penultimate lines of her suicide note, Brodak implored Butler, “Please make art for me. I will read it all.” In the book Butler recalls how Brodak would occasionally joke about writing her own memoir about their relationship. “What fun and what a horror it would be to see our lives from her perspective,” Butler writes. “After her death, I’d discover she’d already started working on a draft, just two brief pages, titled ‘My Novelist.’”

Butler doesn’t just believe Brodak would approve of the book, he believes those who see themselves as safeguarding her legacy by opposing it are just trying to maintain a façade that was so fatally oppressive to her while she was alive. “The people who are trying to say, ‘don’t tell her whole story’ or ‘keep the unwieldy parts of her secret’ are telling her to stay in the box she was in her whole life,” Butler tells me. “They’re trying to silence her.”

Now an executor of her estate, Butler also sees himself as shoring up Brodak’s legacy with this book, of advancing the public knowledge of her life and her body of work. “Molly is an important figure. [Her story] is an important piece of history in my mind,” Butler says. “I wrote this book so others could understand her.”

In 2016, Brodak published Bandit: A Daughter’s Memoir, which detailed her childhood with her father, Joseph, a tool and die worker who resorted to robbing banks to pay his gambling debts in the ’90s. In the book, Brodak writes that Joseph married her mother, Nora Tavalieri, despite still being married to someone else. In Molly, Butler doesn’t paint Tavalieri, a former psychologist, in a particularly flattering light.

“[He describes] her childhood as full of neglect, that she was always lonely, and not treated well. None of that is true,” says Tavalieri.

In the wake of Brodak’s death and the subsequent release of Butler’s book, Tavalieri says she has been part of a support group for survivors of suicide. “Any survivor of suicide would be devastated if somebody printed a book about their dead child that contained secrets about their personal life that should be left private. I don’t care how you couch it in terms of affection or love,” says Tavalieri. “I want to cherish the memory of Molly, the way I knew her: for her writing, for her poetry, for her art. For her beautiful baking. For her love of animals. That’s how Molly should be remembered in a book about her.”

In the fall of 2021, Tavalieri hiked 275 miles through Vermont’s Green Mountains as a tribute to her daughter. “Being in the mountains felt like being close to Molly. We had talked about hiking in that area so it felt like a good place to honor her.” Throughout the journey Tavalieri says she received signs from Brodak. “I’d look down and there’d be a feather,” she says. “And I knew how much she loved birds. I knew she was sending me messages. I felt her presence. We were together spiritually on that hike.”

Back in Michigan, where Brodak grew up, Tavalieri had a plaque in Molly’s honor put on a bench that sits atop a hill in a local park. She goes there often. Despite her issues with the book Tavalieri seems to empathize with Butler and his need to find an outlet for his grief. “We both have our own perspectives on who Molly Brodak was and how we both cared about her in different ways,” she tells me. “My therapist asked me what I thought Molly would think of all this. The first thing that came to my mind was ‘forgive Blake.’ And I do. I know that he suffered and I know this is his way of working through his suffering. I don’t want to carry any more. I just want to carry the beautiful memory of my beautiful daughter.”

As the seven-city book tour draws to a close, Butler has found himself exhausted. “It’s very fucking hard to be in this headspace and especially to travel on top of it,” he says. “I’m trying to both take care of myself and take care of the book. I want this to be the end. I’m ready to move on.”

In conversation, Butler speaks glowingly of Brodak, especially as an artist he admired, but he still grapples with her choice to end her life. “I can sometimes get mad, but for more than the lying and cheating. I’m mad that she took the out that she did. She said in her journals that someone could have saved her life if they said the right thing, but it’s like, you didn’t give anyone that opportunity.”

After Brodak’s death, Butler wasn’t sure if he wanted to keep living. He also thought he’d never love again. He sought intimacy and companionship wherever he could, hungry for a connection that could combat the immovable despair. He saw an escort. He gave Grindr a try. More than anything he spent a lot of time on the phone, particularly with those who had experience with suicide. One of those people was Megan Boyle. “The more Megan and I talked the more we shifted away from suicide and death and Molly to why we’re still alive and to what’s still available in the world. She saved her own life after she nearly died from suicide. So she understood that process,” Butler tells me. “It was just a reawakening of the possibilities of what love could even be. I’ve called it a miracle.”

Months after Molly’s death, Butler and Boyle agreed to meet in Wilmington, North Carolina, halfway between Atlanta and Baltimore, where they respectively lived. By September of 2022 they were married. “I had really given up on love myself, in a kind of calm, jaded way. I thought, Okay, this isn’t going to happen for me. Blake is the first guy who I’ve been with who is actually a good guy. He treats me with respect and kindness,” says Boyle. “It really does feel like a miracle.”

In 2013, Boyle published the blog-novel hybrid Liveblog, in which she attempted to capture nearly every moment of her waking life for about six months, a granular record of her drug use and struggle with depression. It’s given her a unique vantage to view Butler’s memoir. “Strangers are coming to him, bringing incredibly personal and thoughtful things,” Boyle says. “It does seem incredibly overwhelming for him. I think we knew this was going to be a difficult time, but you never know what it’s going to be like till you’re in it.”

Shortly after Molly was published, Butler went for a run in a local park in Baltimore, where he now lives with Boyle. It was drizzling and the sky was completely empty. “I started talking out loud to [Molly] again, saying, ‘Isn’t it crazy what’s happened with the book? I wish I could know what you think of all this. I wish I had some connection to you now.’ And then—and this is crazy, man,” Butler says, his eyes filling with tears. “As I thought that, I looked up into the sky and there was a bird, some large bird of prey, and it was an exact match for the tattoo she had on her back of a bird in flight.” Butler went to get his phone to take a video, but by the time he did it was gone.

Butler says he’s had a lot of experiences like that since Brodak’s death. For a while he’d hear a darker version of her voice in his head. “It was the bad voice. I called it the black dot. It was saying the most fucked-up shit to me. ‘Look what they did to me.’ ‘No one cares.’ ‘They’re not gonna care about you either.’ But that voice went away,” Butler tells me. “Now I hear her voice as the other half, the mature artist and thinker, and while writing I make choices thinking of her. She was a brilliant artist, and I think she was unrecognized in her time. Part of what is good about this book is I really want more people to read her work.”

With Molly, Butler has created a towering tribute to Brodak, in all her complexities, and a harrowing document of unanswerable grief. The moral hand-wringing of some of Molly’s critics shares a lack of nuance with the tabloids that simply characterize Brodak as a “serial cheater,” in that they both fail to grasp the strange and mystifying forms love and forgiveness can take. Conversely, troubling questions are raised by the book, by what Butler has chosen to disclose about Brodak. But the power of Molly lies in its ability to do all of this: to gin up strong reactions and make us ask big questions, all the while being an overwhelmingly powerful and oddly life-affirming work that will keep people talking for some time to come.