Molly is Blake Butler’s attempt to understand his marriage to fellow writer Molly Brodak, who suffered from borderline personality disorder and died by suicide at age thirty-nine. I understand why the author wrote this book, but I wonder why he published it. When you lose a loved one so suddenly and unexpectedly, the grief is hard to process. When you’re in an intimate relationship with someone who has borderline personality disorder, the facts of who they were, what was true, and what was the nature of the relationship are hard to sort out.

Writing can help, but writing about a marriage and about the behavior and thought process of a mentally ill person exposes deeply personal information. Butler has been unjustly accused of writing revenge porn to smear his ex wife after her death. That accusation is not just wrong, but unjust.