He Polarized Readers by Writing About His Late Wife

From his hotel room in downtown Atlanta, Blake Butler could almost see the field where his late wife, the poet Molly Brodak, shot and killed herself in March 2020. “Every time I’ve come here since, I’ve driven to our old house. I’ve driven past where she did it, every time I’ve driven out of the airport here,” he tells me. “But this time I didn’t do that.” Butler, a writer specializing in grim, hallucinatory fiction, was back in Atlanta to promote his new memoir, Molly. It chronicles Butler and Brodak’s sometimes troubled, sometimes totally ordinary romance, their marriage, and the devastating discoveries he made after her death.