TW: suicide + suicidal ideation
A few months ago, my partner came home from work and said, “Wanna read a book about some guy whose wife killed herself?”
“Is it any good?” I said.
They shrugged. My partner had requested an ARC of “Molly” because they like Archway Editions, and the book seemed interesting. Neither of us had heard of Butler, but my partner offered to pass the ARC along to me.
I was lying on the couch, where I spent most of my days save for brief trips to the kitchen and the bathroom when absolutely necessary. I was the most depressed I had ever been in my life, and my partner and I were suffering through it together. I tried to drag them into the orbit of my own self-hatred, as their love for me was an affront to my own wretchedness, the only thing that felt real and true. I had given up on myself, and wanted them to give up on me. In fact, in my worst moments I viewed my relationship with them, like all of my relationships, as an inconvenience, because they would not allow me to die. My partner was more desperate for my recovery than I was. From my depressive haze, it seemed like my partner, familiar with the growing seriousness of my own suicidal ideations, recommended Molly with an ulterior motive, one I bristled at. Nevertheless, I gave Molly a try.
Molly was beautiful, it was brutal, it was brilliant, you should read it. I cried my way through it, reading the whole thing in a single sitting, then I read it again a couple of months later. It was jarring to see the experience of loving someone who is mired so deeply in her own self-hatred reflected back at me. So much of Molly’s behavior emerges from a desire to confirm that the worst of her is true, or to numb her ruthless internal monologue with a new flirtation or a lie or a joke. The most heartbreaking parts of the book are when Molly turns her self-castigating voice outwards, especially at Blake. Most heartbreaking of all is when Blake internalizes it.
I’d hate to portray this book as cloying or diaristic when it is anything but. Blake writes about Molly with what I can only describe as unsparing attention. He presents Molly’s obsessions, dreams, flaws, flights of fancy, artistic ambitions, insecurities, and traumas without attempting to reconcile her contradictions, much less his own. As the book got gnarlier, and Molly’s behavior got more harrowing and nasty, I found myself longing for a comforting authorial bang of the gavel, assurance that Molly was gaslighting or manipulative even abusive. But these assurances never came. I think the book is better for it.
Molly is also a strange book. It has these opaque, lyrical passages, as if a supernatural force is slithering somewhere beneath the surface of the prose. It gives a mythic significance to the betrayals of everyday life. Never have I cried so much about someone quitting Skyrim or the cancellation of the Great American Baking Show.
I went back and forth about whether or not to mention myself in my review of “Molly,” or whether to review it at all. I’m wary of a kind of depressive narcissism that transforms all art into self-help. A lot of people respond to art about mental health or suicide with their own stories, a tendency I find endearing, embarrassing, and kind of distasteful, depending on the day. I suppose artists are moved by seeing the impacts of their work firsthand, even in these clumsy, nakedly sincere ways. On the other hand, it also seems overwhelming to be confronted with, to put it most uncharitably, so much trauma dumping.
But here I am, a rando making a Goodreads account to write a too-long, too-personal review of this book months before it comes out and there will be other, saner reviews that can bury it. “Molly” was a gift. Blake’s insistence on Molly’s complexity, and refusal to slot her into some convenient, totalizing narrative is the ultimate refusal of her distorted all-or-nothing logic, an act of love that’s rigorous and unsentimental, but deeply kind. True love is a place where you cannot hide. I wish Molly didn’t feel like she had to hide, and I wish I didn’t, either. This book gave me a bit more strength to try to let myself be seen.