Molly

Tags:  non-fiction, memoirs,

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.

Yes, his wife did some bad things, and these must be included in a true and accurate account of the marriage. But unless you’ve been very close to a person like Molly, you don’t understand the extent to which the decisions and behaviors of a borderline person are aimed at hurting and destroying themselves. They suffer more than you can imagine from their tortured thinking and self-destructive actions, and the loved ones they hurt along the way are more collateral damage than primary targets.

Some readers have judged Molly to be an awful person for the things she did and said. Others have judged the author to be an awful person for portraying her troubling thoughts and deeds. Other still have called him a fool for enduring abuse. None of these criticisms is valid. Mental illness simply does not follow the rational norms of society, and the behavior of the mentally ill cannot be judged by the same standards that apply to sane majority of society. This is why criminal law includes the verdict “not guilty by reason of insanity.” The mind that committed the act was not inhabiting the same reality as the rest of us, nor did it process information the same way. Actions that seem inexplicable and unjustifiable to the average person appear perfectly rational and justified to the distorted mind in which they arose. This is the tragedy of mental illness.

Some readers have wondered how the author could be pulled into such an abusive relationship. Well, if you’ve ever known a borderline person, you’d know that when they are at their best, they can be the most attractive and compelling people in the world, especially if they happen to be perceptive and sharp-minded. Their emotions are raw and intense and their insights can light up the world. When you see the depth and intensity of the joy and delight they feel in good times, it’s hard not to fall for them. They are the brightest lights in the world.

The bad side comes out later. The fear, grief, jealousy and self-hatred; the lies and distortions, promiscuity and drug use. It’s painful to watch any person endure the kinds of horrible thoughts a borderline person endures, and no one lives it more intensely than they do. If you’re their partner, you keep thinking of that better person, the happier person they were in the beginning. You try to lead them back to that more positive place, but something about the borderline mind resists all influence. The negative reality they project from within overwhelms any reality trying to come in from outside. The relationship becomes maddening, and the conflict becomes abuse, as the author describes in this book.

Again, the book is neither revenge porn nor character assassination. It’s reality, and people who haven’t experienced it firsthand cannot understand what it’s like to live through. A psychologist once told me that she could tell which patients were borderline during their first meeting because, “After an hour of talking with them, you feel like you’re insane.” Try being in love with someone like that.

The author clearly wrote this book to process his grief, and to try to sort out the distorted reality he fell into in this marriage. The book is full of unfocused, run-on sentences that you have to read five or six times to make sense of. This makes for a long and often frustrating read. This kind of confused writing is characteristic of a first draft. It’s the raw material that a writer whips into shape in later drafts, after many rounds of editing. The unfocused, run-on sentences are also characteristic of the tangled emotion of both grief and the borderline mind. You can’t write a neat book about an emotionally messy person.

This brings me back to my question of why the author published this. It’s impossible for anyone to fairly or accurately judge any marriage from the outside, so why give them the chance? The author has taken a lot of abuse for trying. It’s also extremely difficult to portray the good and bad sides of a borderline person in a way that evokes sympathy in the reader. It’s hard to even convey the essence of the person, because their sense of self is so unstable.

The charm and beauty of the borderline spirit in its brighter phases is almost impossible to capture in words. The lies and abuse that come later begin to grate on the average reader. Many readers can’t stand the tension and paradox of a character who shows such intense positive and negative aspects. The reader’s mind moves toward a simple judgment to resolve that tension. They want her to be good or bad, but not both. Most will come away with a negative opinion.

I commend Blake Butler for writing this book, for trying to capture a spirit that defies words. It’s a hard subject and a hard read. I do wonder what this book would look like if he wrote it again ten or twenty years from now. I wonder if he’ll try.