This helped him cope with the loss.
A man learned about his wife’s secret life after her death.
About it writes nypost.com.
On March 8, 2020, Molly Brodak, a well-known writer and teacher at Atlanta University, shot herself to death. The woman was 39 years old. Her husband, also a writer, Blake Butler was devastated by the death of his lover.
“I knew she was depressed, but how could she give up on me? How could she give up on us? How could she give up on herself?” – commented the 44-year-old widower.
Young, talented and beautiful, the couple were something of a golden couple in local literary circles. Blake didn’t realize how unhappy his wife was, but as he wrote in his memoir Molly, he soon realized there was a lot he didn’t know about the woman he loved.
When Butler first met Brodak, she was in prison. They connected via Facebook. Butler didn’t know any other writers in Atlanta and was excited to meet Molly, a poet who lived in nearby Augusta, Georgia.
They made an appointment. That evening at the bar, she showed him a recent MRI scan and told him that she had previously had a brain tumor.
“She was a good woman who came out of nowhere and seemed to bring chaos with her,” he said. “I’ve always been attracted to wild women.”
Brodak shared her difficult childhood. Her father robbed banks to pay off his gambling debts and spent time in prison twice. She herself stole from the store. Her mother suffered from bipolar disorder and left young Molly virtually unattended. But she hid other aspects of her past: that she started using heroin at age 12, that she allowed her older boyfriends to burn her with cigarettes, that she was actually married when she first started dating Butler.
The couple married in 2017 at the top of Mount Arabia, a half-hour drive from their home. It was an intimate ceremony: the bride and groom and their mothers. They wrote their vows and read a poem by Czeslaw Milosz. Afterwards, they held a party at the Emory University campus museum. Their first dance was to Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters.”
“It was kind of an adventure,” Butler said.
But soon after her death, Butler discovered that his wife had met one of her students just weeks after their wedding.
He went through her phone, looking for photos to show in the slideshow at her funeral. During this time, he found out that she had cheated on him with many men. He found numerous photographs of her posing in lingerie and with sex toys, as well as explicit videos of her saying other men’s names in a childish voice.
Digging deeper, he discovered emails containing seductive photographs addressed to her students at the various colleges where she taught.
He also discovered correspondence with a poet who had likely flown to Tucson to have sex from Broaduck during a writing retreat paid for by Butler.
“When I found out the lies she was hiding, it was kind of a relief,” Butler said. “It’s not that I failed her. It’s that she built this world of lies.”
He began writing Molly about a month after her death.
“I said out loud, ‘I’m going to write a book about you, and it’s going to be the best book I’ve ever written.’
He eventually concluded that Molly probably had a personality disorder.
Butler found love again and got married again in 2022. He and his new wife now live in Baltimore, and it’s a surprisingly happy ending to a tragic story.
“After my relationship with Molly, I really learned to think of the world as a place of pain,” he said. “I certainly wasn’t looking for love, I was looking for a way to destroy myself.”
Let us remind you that a woman caught her lover cheating and threw his things from the sixth floor. As a result, she was taken to the hospital.
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2023-12-05 11:34:00
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