William McGregor Paxton, “Woman with Book,” 1981.
Finding Myself in a Memoir About Someone Else
In March of 2020, when the world entered the pandemic, I was 31 years-old, already in the throes of a major life rupture, or as an astrologer whom I turned to in lieu of therapy explained it, my “Saturn return.” Everything around me had fallen apart but I couldn’t point to one single event. A series of converging crises had left me unmoored: My partner had left me for a mutual friend. This had rippling financial effects. I had nowhere to live. Then, my father was diagnosed with a disease I had never heard of called Lewy Body Dementia. Disarmed by the terrifying delusions and hallucinations of my father’s disease, I withered in a state of ambiguous grief and spiritual disillusionment. Hence the astrologer and a newfound interest in the mystical or occult.
When I think about how I felt at that time — grief is literally a state of psychosis, a friend who is also a therapist once told me — I am filled with wonder at my own will to find a way back to normality. There was a time when I woke up every morning heavy with dread. I couldn’t look at a spoon without the thought that I might like to use it to scoop out my own eye. Now, I am ok. I am different but OK.
This past January was full of new beginnings. Three years removed from the life rupture(s), I was thankful to have a new job, a new boyfriend, and a new apartment—all things I once wondered if I would ever have again. And during this time of new beginnings, I also happened to get COVID. I spent a lot of time home alone quarantined, reading and feeling weirdly nostalgic for the first horrible days of COVID quarantine.
That week, I read “Molly,” a new memoir by Blake Butler, a writer I knew briefly over the internet in March of 2020. I wanted to read the book, but I was apprehensive for two reasons. First, I knew the book would return me to that difficult era of my life, and second, it stirred up my personal memories of the author. My brief friendship with Blake ended abruptly when he stopped replying to my messages. I was hurt; I felt abandoned. The frayed connection had nagged at me periodically.
But reading the book, which documents his own life rupture, gave me new perspective. Our short friendship, briefly alluded to in the memoir’s pages, made sense in the context of the internal world his memoir revealed. I understood our connection as part of his own path from grief-induced psychosis to ordinary life.
I want to come out and say first that Blake had it harder than me. This was part of the appeal in speaking with him—the trauma he had endured made my own seem survivable. As he once told me his mother said, referring to her interest in Holocaust memoirs, “when life is hard, read something harder.”
In Molly, Blake writes about his relationship with his wife, the poet and memoirist Molly Brodak, who committed suicide three years into their marriage. In March of 2020, weeks shy of her 40th birthday, she lay down in a field near their home in Atlanta and shot herself. Shortly after her death, Blake discovered Molly had been living a double life, keeping secrets including plans for her death—the purchase of a gun, and a long series of romantic affairs, some with students at the university where she taught writing. This new knowledge of Molly alters Blake’s understanding of their relationship, and Molly, and himself. How had he missed the clues right under his nose? He describes his own unbound state of consciousness in the months following her death. “This is how my life is now…who I used to think I was is dead and gone.”
In Molly, Blake describes the new reality his brain altering trauma has brought, drawing on his and Molly’s respective histories of trauma, both personal and intergenerational, to make sense of his present situation. Blake shows us that trauma does not exist in a vacuum—it’s always layered. “The day after the funeral,” Blake explains, “they closed the city in pandemic.”
This is how we met: I was crashing with my sister and her husband in LA. Each night I wandered Maravista alone to see the palm trees and the moon reflecting light off the Pacific Ocean. LA was an ethereal, surreal reprieve where I could be perpetually stoned among the cacti and lemon trees. Grief had turned me into one giant exposed nerve, sensitive and helplessly open to the world. The ordinary became transcendent. On one of my nightly walks, while alternating between petting succulents and checking my phone, I saw one of Blake’s tweets in my Twitter feed. Hours later, he messaged me to compliment an essay I had published in a dating column. I was flattered by his attention: an author in his 40’s with a long list of publications had bothered to read my dating essay.
“How are you doing with everything happening?” he asked me.
“I was already grieving when this happened,” I wrote to him. “So, this collective chaos is kind of normalizing.”
“I am living in layers of grief as ambient space right now basically,” he replied. I’ve thought of this response so many days. He had managed to put words to my chaotic experience, renewing my faith in the power of writing sentences. I never knew how he could be so eloquent while going so mad. This was just after Molly’s death. Exactly six weeks and two days, I recently confirmed after consulting our message history.
We were both spending our lockdowns in the guestrooms of generous couples more highly functioning than we were, stoned, scrolling our phones in search of meaning and connection.
Our conversations covered much of the ground his memoir later would. We had both found out our partners had affairs we never suspected. We questioned who we were now that we knew we’d lived so closely beside someone who hid so much. Another thing Blake and I had in common was our parents’ dementia, which Blake writes about in his memoir, providing context for his own state of mental health at the time of Molly’s suicide.
I told Blake about my father. Although I did not know what it was like to suffer from dementia, my state of grief allowed me to relate my father’s altered and othered existence. We both cried easily now. We saw the world differently.
The disease made my father feel cold all the time. Even in the worst kind of global warming-induced heat wave he wore a hat and scarf. He hallucinated piles of dead bodies outside the window, a gunman at the door. He urinated in a basket of throw blankets in the middle of the night, mistaking it for the toilet.
“My father was, I mean he is, a musician,” I told Blake. This confusion about time — the new blurred lines between past and present — fit with the unending, unstructured days of lockdown. And this friendship, which entailed texting day and night, into the early morning, was unleashed from ordinary temporality.
I told Blake my father had spent his life writing musicals, living in a constant state of financial precarity, getting closer and closer to a production on Broadway. One of his shows was in production when his mind and body failed him. It seemed unjust. What was left of his lifetime of artistic efforts? As the disease progressed, he tried to write, although he was no longer able to use a pen or play the guitar. Instead, he would pull the blankets tight around himself, shivering in a delirious state. “There’s no music coming from this blanket,” he complained, “let’s start it from the top.”
When I recounted this story to Blake, he said “Wow.”
“Why wow?” I asked.
“His delusion sounds like part of his art at this point…his life is woven in the music,” he replied.
Blake allowed me to believe art was a way of transcending ordinary human existence. So too, grief opened doors to the unseen. I knew Blake had believed himself to be in communication with Molly after her death through the music they had listened to together while she was alive.
Soon Molly herself became a point of unlikely connection for me and Blake. He told me I resembled her. So, I reasoned, we were supposed to be in contact. Perhaps Molly’s ghost was behind our strange encounter. It might sound insane but this logic still makes a kind of sense to me. While grieving, the mundane took on new cosmic significance. Trips to the grocery store presented opportunities for poignant realizations of collective sorrow. A leashed dog, for example, gazing into the window of a health food store in search of its owner. My new friendship with Blake was big enough to make life feel meaningful again, even when the suffering I had encountered seemed so senseless.
Not only did I resemble Molly, but we shared a family history. The intergenerational trauma Blake writes about includes the Holocaust. Molly’s father was born in a displaced persons camp in Poland, the kind where my grandmother, who had survived Auschwitz, met my grandfather, and started a family. Both my grandparents and Molly’s father eventually got visas to go to Detroit. And both Molly and I had returned to Poland to write about our family history and post-war memory.
In his book, Blake writes about Molly’s understanding of the Holocaust, drawing a connection to her horror at human cruelty and her decision to end her life. While in touch with Blake, we wondered if it was possible to ever recover from a trauma so great as Auschwitz. I told him about the survivor and writer Ka-Tzetnik, whose memoir, “Shivitti” describes his experience undergoing clinical guided acid trips in 1970’s Amsterdam to find relief from PTSD symptoms. “You would need to expand your understanding of what’s real to heal,” I told Blake. He ordered me a copy so we could read it together. By the time it arrived, we had fallen out of touch. I read “Shivitti” by myself, too disturbed by the hallucinations of Auschwitz Ka-Tzetnik describes to register his relief.
I still don’t know why Blake and I stopped speaking. But I missed how he was able to help me find words to describe my grief. I missed how he had understood it so well.
In Blake’s memoir, he wrote about the encounters he had with strangers like me over the internet. I read these pages eagerly, curious to see if he would mention me or provide a well-worded explanation for what had happened between us. He describes a correspondence with a woman over the internet that walks “the line between consolation and romance.” He might have written this about me, but the quote attributed to this woman is nothing I would have said. He writes about the many people he was in touch with at that time: “…I found great comfort speaking on the phone to friends and strangers alike, and many nights I’d schedule a call so I could hear another person’s voice there in my head in place of mine…I felt all this wind in me come pouring out, all these feelings and ideas I might have otherwise hidden.”
Blake explains the disintegration of communication with these strangers succinctly: “nothing stuck.” And how could it? For years to come none of my attempts at intimacy would stick.
Initially I felt hurt by my own insignificance in the context of Blake’s life story. Over the next few days, I understood it better. I had felt the same as him; I had taken comfort in the same parts of life as him: in art and expression and connection. These frayed connections were how we found relief and healed.
I remember a tweet Blake wrote at the time of our correspondence: “somehow writing texts and emails feels more like writing than writing these days.” This tweet reminded me of my father, who holds the material of a blanket and believes it contains the potential for music. The fabric is woven in music. Writing to Blake over the internet, typing day and night, allowed me to see the possibilities of language to not only describe but transcend suffering.
I think we did this in the spirit of Ka-Tzetnik who continued to write about his life and to search for relief. “That’s why I love writing,” Blake wrote to me once, “time and space are mutable, language is a tool. If there are layers of trauma, there are probably layers to lots of other aspects of life we don’t always touch.” In writing to each other, we reached for those untouched layers.