I was drawn to memoirs about suicide even before Rebecca’s death, probably because when someone you love travels often against the thin curtain between life and death, these stories can feel like windows. The characters seated at the dinner table are strangers, but the scene inside is familiar, comforting. In April of 2024, after Rebecca finished up a brief hospitalization, we sat in the backseat while her brother drove, discussing Blake Butler’s new memoir, Molly. I considered that it was a bad idea to talk about a book about suicide with someone who had just been hospitalized for suicidality, but ultimately it was worse to pretend with Rebecca. She was straightforward. Anyways, I had missed her, and had nothing else interesting to say.
I explained the premise of the book: Butler’s wife, the poet Molly Brodak, died by suicide at the age of thirty-nine, three years into her marriage with Butler. The first thirty or so pages are an account of the afternoon of Brodak’s death: a bad feeling, an aborted run, a note tacked to the door, the sound of a gunshot. The rest of the book is autobiographical, a love story between two writers, but also, a tale of deceit. After Brodak’s suicide, Butler read her diaries, emails, and text messages, and he shares his discoveries—painting a portrait of Brodak as pathological, a compulsive liar and cheater and a sexual predator towards her students. It was possibly the most salacious, horrible, and tender thing I had ever read; I started crying maybe five pages into it.
I fished my copy out of my backpack so that Rebecca could look at it. The book was fat and the cover appealing—an unblinking blonde woman staring through a French door. It had also been impossible to get a hold of for months, which had made me (and many other readers) want it even more. The Brooklyn-based press Archway Editions published it in December of 2023, and it sold out immediately. Four months later, Molly went into its fourth printing, which was around the time I could finally lay my hands on it.
I explained to Rebecca that, even before its publication, literary Twitter had been in flames over Molly. People were calling it tacky, brave, MFA garbage, heart wrenching. Leading the criticism was the author Sarah Rose Etter—once a friend of Brodak and Butler and the woman who drove Butler to Brodak’s funeral—who denounced the entire project as, “literary revenge porn against a mentally unwell woman who took her own life.”
Rebecca told me that ethically she didn’t agree with Butler’s project, his decision to publish the contents of his wife’s personal correspondence and suicide note, which Butler included verbatim. She said that if she died, she hoped no one would try to reveal that she hadn’t been who she said she was, because of course she wasn’t. Who was? She asked me to borrow my copy. I told her that I wanted her to wait until she was feeling better.
Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to even tell Rebecca about Molly. She had been thinking about killing herself and then I showed her a book about a woman who had killed herself. But what else could we have talked about? Summer was coming. Her brother and I were leaving for our honeymoon in three months. Facts felt like pointless things, and the best way to love someone is to not look away from their pain.
*
I have an MFA, so I’m typically a fan of MFA garbage. I think that what people mean when they call something MFA garbage is that it’s well-written and self-serious. Or maybe they only mean that it is self-serious. Briefly, I was obsessed with Molly. I compulsively read it as tears streamed down my face. I talked about it not just with Rebeeca, but with everyone. I told both my husband and my therapist that reading it was ruining my life. I fell into an all-consuming pit of despair, a habit of mine, unable to create boundaries between myself and the art I consume.
But then, about halfway through, I started hating the book. I grew exhausted of Butler’s righteousness as his self-awareness receded and his once meticulous prose shriveled into rants. He used so, so, so many commas! At first I reread entire paragraphs, and then I gave up rereading at all. I began directing my marginalia notes directly towards Butler, writing things like, not this again, Blake!
I could’ve stopped reading. Summer had arrived and my husband and I were going to Paris, Split, and Copenhagen. Rebecca had gotten a new job as a paralegal. Her best friend Dani was getting married at the beginning of July, and Rebecca had bought a green dress with a line of sequins. Our downstairs neighbor Alex had gotten his bike stolen by a twelve-year-old. Philadelphia was sticky and gross and when we left our bedroom window open, the room filled with the smell of cigarettes.
I didn’t see much of Rebecca, but she sent me texts like, “are you in cleveland with ben i guess it wouldn’t make sense for him to go to cleveland alone,” and “okay does ur hot downstairs neighbor have a gf” and “grindcore cafe is hiring like four ppl but i despise grindcore lmao the music, not the business.” She sent me a link to a playlist of dance music she made called, “you had a breakdown, now break it down.” The cover photo was of a hospital cafeteria tray.
Begrudgingly, I kept reading Molly. I couldn’t just decide to leave this pit of despair—I had to be guided out.
Here is a passage next to which I wrote, this is tiresome:
Do you ask people how they’re doing? Do you wonder? Do you really want to know? No, really: Do you care about anything as much as you care about yourself? Could you ever?”
Unbelievably, here is a passage next to which I wrote, Blake…you hated TREES?
I often think about our trees—the ingrown pair you pointed out at the preserve where we would walk, how you said we’d be like that someday in our old age. Separate but together… I told you once that I didn’t like trees because all I can think of when I see one is their roots, the strange, disgusting maze they grow from beneath the ground. I’d thought you wouldn’t like that, but you smiled. I think that’s when I started liking trees.
Nevertheless, she persisted!
I slogged through Butler’s re-enchantment with trees, his uneventful exploration into bisexuality (he gave up when men started blocking him on Grindr because he wouldn’t send dick pics), the pages and pages in which he unfurled Molly’s most horrific secrets.
At page 312, I was finished. I wrote, *lets out sigh of relief!*
I needed to laugh so badly that I felt sick.
*
Maybe Butler was scared that if we, the readers, laughed, we would be released even temporarily from the dark pits of hell he sent us to. Personally, I have laughed so many times in hell, and it’s never released me.
Rebecca committed suicide in July of 2024, three months after I showed her Molly in the backseat of a car on its way to Passover dinner. On the day of her death, I couldn’t get the lyrics of a Bright Eyes song out of my head. It was the song First Day of My Life, but my brain began repeating on a loop this is the worst day of my life, in Conor Oberst’s gentle tenor.
*
In high school, my physics teacher once said that during moments of crisis, she thinks only in equations. When she saw the plane hit the World Trade Towers, she considered at what velocity the plane must have been traveling to cause the building to fall as it did.
I spent the weeks after Rebecca’s death narrating entire days in my head. When I walked to the FedEx to buy boxes to pack up her house, I thought, The sun was out in a horrible way. The woman at the counter asked what size boxes I wanted and I said a few large, a few medium, which meant nothing to her, but at least she was kind and suggested dimensions, which I said yes to even if I couldn’t picture what those dimensions meant.
I told both my husband and my therapist that reading Molly was ruining my life. I fell into an all-consuming pit of despair, a habit of mine, unable to create boundaries between myself and the art I consume.While packing up Rebecca’s belongings, I found a bra I had gifted her, tan and cotton and meant for someone with massive boobs, which Rebecca had and I didn’t, and I thought about how much she had loved that bra, how weird it would be to keep it. We all agreed we wouldn’t bury Rebecca wearing any bra—that would’ve been disrespectful—and I thought when I bought that bra for her birthday, that’s when I really felt like her big sister. A big sister buys a little sister a bra.
We looked for a note. We found nothing. Dani exclaimed, “I can’t believe that bitch didn’t leave us a note.” If Rebecca had left us a note, I might have read it enough times that words started to feel like they belonged to me. I might have published it in a book, because how can words that changed your life so permanently not belong to you?
While I stacked Rebecca’s collection of books into piles—to keep, to give—my husband and his family picked out a cherry wood casket in which, a few days later, we buried Rebecca, bra-less and in Doc Martens, her dark hair covering the spot on her temple where a bullet had entered.
*
Grief is the strangest ghost I’ve ever encountered. Even now, a year later, I can’t be certain that grief is even one ghost, but rather an entire army. I kept reading suicide memoirs after Rebecca’s death because the ghosts of grief that visited me were quite social and preferred company, and also because I wanted to exist, even temporarily, in those realities similar to but disjointed from my own.
Yiyun Li published Where Reasons End, a “novel cloaked as a memoir,” in the wake of her elder son Vincent’s suicide. In May of this year, Li published Things in Nature Merely Grow, a more straightforward memoir about, quite unimaginably, the suicide of her younger son, James, only seven years after Vincent’s death. I read Where Reasons End on a trip to Los Angeles where a friend gently led me around Santa Monica and assured me that LA was the best place to be depressed.
It’s not that Li is opaque surrounding the details of both of her sons’ suicides: she tells us that they both chose to die in the same way, jumping in front of oncoming trains. She tells us that both Vincent and James held certain pragmatic views of the world, in which they couldn’t reconcile imperfection or purpose. Rather, unlike Butler, Li is disinterested in establishing any form of intimacy with the reader. The conceit of both of her books is limiting and exacting: to process the loss of a child, to resurrect that child imperfectly through language.
In Daphne Merkin’s review of Things in Nature Merely Grow, and by extension Where Reasons End, she criticizes Li’s omission of any kind of medical specificity to her sons’ mental struggles.
Still, none of these speculations about their respective temperaments explains why the boys, seemingly deeply loved and flourishing, decided to opt out so early on…One wonders what anguish beyond the usual teenage existential despair they were escaping and why they chose the finality of suicide over less extreme expressions of unhappiness or more mediated courses of action.
In his review of Molly, Dwight Garner wrote, “It’s a disordered book, almost Lovecraftian at times in its airless luridness.” Butler hypothesized that Brodak suffered from borderline personality disorder, despite Brodak having never received a formal diagnosis.
Should we assume that there is a tasteful way to write about the reasons one chooses suicide? One that provides just enough facts to satiate the voyeurism of the reader, but not so much that we feel the dead, who have already suffered so deeply, are being wrung out, even taxidermied, for the purpose of a show, or worse, for the reader’s understanding?
Bouquets of white flowers began appearing on our apartment stoop. A thoughtful neighbor and his husband brought an especially immaculate bouquet inside their home for safekeeping. When I went to retrieve the flowers, I explained that my husband’s little sister had died. He asked me if she had been sick, and I said yes.
*
Rebecca’s housemate was a poet named Will. Although we hadn’t met before we cleaned out Rebecca’s room, we occasionally checked in, asked if the other was writing. Over Instagram DMs, Will expressed to me that they feared everything they had written since Rebecca’s death centered themself rather than Rebecca. Who were we to write about ourselves when she was the one who was dead?
Should we assume that there is a tasteful way to write about the reasons one chooses suicide?Etter accused Butler of not being honest about his own deceits in his marriage with Brodak. Reading Molly, I too felt that there were moments where Butler, who spent so long narrowing in on Brodak’s transgressions, dismissed his own questionable behavior— drinking until blacking out, getting angry and smashing things. In Merkin’s review, she hypothesized that Li was probably a “demanding” mother who was “overly ambitious” on her sons’ behalf. I messaged Will back that I had always felt like it was impossible to write anything that wasn’t ultimately about myself.
When we write, we impose ourselves onto a story: we look through the window and see ourselves sitting at the dinner table. I’m sitting at the table with my family; we’re telling stories about Rebecca. Her orange cat slides against our ankles. We’re laughing because somehow, all the clothes we’ve retrieved from her house are damp. They smell like her and like mold. Her passport and diaries and Airpods sit in the basement in a box marked Important.
*
How should we, the living, write about the dead’s decision to die?
I’ve realized that what we ask of all suicide memoirs is somewhat unfair. We want to know intimately about the person who has died, what shadowy causes within them drew them towards suicide, yet we still hold the privacy of the dead to be sacred. Inversely, we want to learn very little about the person who is writing the memoir, unless, eventually, we want to blame them. It’s possible that memoirs of suicide will always be disappointing. As the army of grief marches unceasingly forward, what satisfaction is there to be found? Grief offers nothing permanent, except for the sharp truth of our beloved’s eternal absence.
On a windy afternoon, we met for Rebeca’s gravestone unveiling. My mother-in-law placed a speaker on the gravestone to play the Mourner’s Kaddish. The wind immediately threw the speaker to the ground. “She wanted to hear better!” Dani cried, and we all laughed as the wind drew tears down our faces.
