Molly Aviva Brodak was born in Detroit, Michigan and grew up in Rochester. Her father worked for General Motors and other manufacturers, and her mother was a therapist. They married and divorced twice, most recently in 1988. Molly lived primarily with her mother while her sister lived mainly with their father. She graduated from high school in Rochester in 1998, earned a bachelor’s degree at Oakland University there in 2004, then earned a master’s degree in creative writing from West Virginia University in 2008.
In 2010, she published a collection of poetry called “A Little Middle of the Night” which won the Iowa Poetry Prize. Her poems appeared widely, including in Granta, Poetry magazine, Fence, Map Literary, New York Tyrant, Diode, New Orleans Review, Ninth Letter, Colorado Review, Bateau, and Hayden's Ferry Review. She moved to Atlanta in 2011 to take part in a fellowship at Emory University and teach there. In Georgia, she also taught creative writing, composition, poetry and world literature at Augusta State University, the Savannah College of Art and Design and, most recently, Georgia College and State University.
In 2016, she wrote and released a memoir called “Bandit”, it was an unsparing account of her dysfunctional childhood with her father, Joseph Brodak, a tool and die worker who began robbing banks in the summer of 1994 to pay off his gambling debts. At the time, Molly was barely a teenager. She delivered the broad details of the robberies matter-of-factly before taking a deeply personal look at what it was like to come of age in the environment her father had created.
“The facts are easy to say; I say them all the time,” she wrote early in the book.
“They leave me out. They cover over the trouble like a lid. This isn’t about them.”
The memoir was well-received by critics — Kirkus Reviews called it “intelligent, disturbing and profoundly honest” — and Molly was interviewed by newspapers and the NPR program “All Things Considered.” She told the Florida newspaper The Tallahassee Democrat in 2017 that reflecting on her childhood for “Bandit” had given her an understanding of the enduring psychological destabilization it had caused her.
“I know now that children need consistency to believe in people and to figure out how to have trust and self-esteem,” she said, “so inconsistency is bad for kids, and bad for my sister and I. We didn’t know if one day Dad would be good or bad, if he’d love us or hate us.”
But by her account, writing her memoir had done little to help her understand her father’s actions. “The only thing I’ve learned,” she wrote in an essay for British tabloid The Daily Mail in 2016, “is that there are no easy answers; that simplistic narratives cannot be so easily laid over the messy and unpredictable events of the real world.”
In 2018, Molly earned a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, which she used to travel to Poland for research on another memoir about the fluid nature of nationality, based on her father’s parents, who were killed in the Holocaust. Her husband, Blake Butler has stated that the book, “Alone in Poland,” had not yet found a publisher, but that another book of Ms. Brodak’s poetry, “The Cipher,” is scheduled to be published by Pleiades Press in the fall.
Molly was also an accomplished baker, appearing on “The Great American Baking Show” on ABC in 2019, the same year she started a home baking business called Kookie House. She had a rare gift for blending fine art with an almost scientific love of creating new recipes to make fantastic confections. Her devotion to research and knowledge was clear not only in her writing and baking, but in her approach to the world, the environment, and humanity. She loved nature and caring for animals, especially her chickens. She had a beautiful heart and mind, and truly touched the lives of all who knew her.
In 2020, Molly committed suicide at the age of 39 near her home in Atlanta. She had a history of depression dating back to her childhood. She left behind a wide array of poems, including a book of them called “Folk Physics,” which she sent to her husband on the day she died.
(Bio by The New York Times)
In 2010, she published a collection of poetry called “A Little Middle of the Night” which won the Iowa Poetry Prize. Her poems appeared widely, including in Granta, Poetry magazine, Fence, Map Literary, New York Tyrant, Diode, New Orleans Review, Ninth Letter, Colorado Review, Bateau, and Hayden's Ferry Review. She moved to Atlanta in 2011 to take part in a fellowship at Emory University and teach there. In Georgia, she also taught creative writing, composition, poetry and world literature at Augusta State University, the Savannah College of Art and Design and, most recently, Georgia College and State University.
In 2016, she wrote and released a memoir called “Bandit”, it was an unsparing account of her dysfunctional childhood with her father, Joseph Brodak, a tool and die worker who began robbing banks in the summer of 1994 to pay off his gambling debts. At the time, Molly was barely a teenager. She delivered the broad details of the robberies matter-of-factly before taking a deeply personal look at what it was like to come of age in the environment her father had created.
“The facts are easy to say; I say them all the time,” she wrote early in the book.
“They leave me out. They cover over the trouble like a lid. This isn’t about them.”
The memoir was well-received by critics — Kirkus Reviews called it “intelligent, disturbing and profoundly honest” — and Molly was interviewed by newspapers and the NPR program “All Things Considered.” She told the Florida newspaper The Tallahassee Democrat in 2017 that reflecting on her childhood for “Bandit” had given her an understanding of the enduring psychological destabilization it had caused her.
“I know now that children need consistency to believe in people and to figure out how to have trust and self-esteem,” she said, “so inconsistency is bad for kids, and bad for my sister and I. We didn’t know if one day Dad would be good or bad, if he’d love us or hate us.”
But by her account, writing her memoir had done little to help her understand her father’s actions. “The only thing I’ve learned,” she wrote in an essay for British tabloid The Daily Mail in 2016, “is that there are no easy answers; that simplistic narratives cannot be so easily laid over the messy and unpredictable events of the real world.”
In 2018, Molly earned a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, which she used to travel to Poland for research on another memoir about the fluid nature of nationality, based on her father’s parents, who were killed in the Holocaust. Her husband, Blake Butler has stated that the book, “Alone in Poland,” had not yet found a publisher, but that another book of Ms. Brodak’s poetry, “The Cipher,” is scheduled to be published by Pleiades Press in the fall.
Molly was also an accomplished baker, appearing on “The Great American Baking Show” on ABC in 2019, the same year she started a home baking business called Kookie House. She had a rare gift for blending fine art with an almost scientific love of creating new recipes to make fantastic confections. Her devotion to research and knowledge was clear not only in her writing and baking, but in her approach to the world, the environment, and humanity. She loved nature and caring for animals, especially her chickens. She had a beautiful heart and mind, and truly touched the lives of all who knew her.
In 2020, Molly committed suicide at the age of 39 near her home in Atlanta. She had a history of depression dating back to her childhood. She left behind a wide array of poems, including a book of them called “Folk Physics,” which she sent to her husband on the day she died.
(Bio by The New York Times)
Molly Aviva Brodak was born in Detroit, Michigan and grew up in Rochester. Her father worked for General Motors and other manufacturers, and her mother was a therapist. They married and divorced twice, most recently in 1988. Molly lived primarily with her mother while her sister lived mainly with their father. She graduated from high school in Rochester in 1998, earned a bachelor’s degree at Oakland University there in 2004, then earned a master’s degree in creative writing from West Virginia University in 2008.
In 2010, she published a collection of poetry called “A Little Middle of the Night” which won the Iowa Poetry Prize. Her poems appeared widely, including in Granta, Poetry magazine, Fence, Map Literary, New York Tyrant, Diode, New Orleans Review, Ninth Letter, Colorado Review, Bateau, and Hayden's Ferry Review. She moved to Atlanta in 2011 to take part in a fellowship at Emory University and teach there. In Georgia, she also taught creative writing, composition, poetry and world literature at Augusta State University, the Savannah College of Art and Design and, most recently, Georgia College and State University.
In 2016, she wrote and released a memoir called “Bandit”, it was an unsparing account of her dysfunctional childhood with her father, Joseph Brodak, a tool and die worker who began robbing banks in the summer of 1994 to pay off his gambling debts. At the time, Molly was barely a teenager. She delivered the broad details of the robberies matter-of-factly before taking a deeply personal look at what it was like to come of age in the environment her father had created.
“The facts are easy to say; I say them all the time,” she wrote early in the book.
“They leave me out. They cover over the trouble like a lid. This isn’t about them.”
The memoir was well-received by critics — Kirkus Reviews called it “intelligent, disturbing and profoundly honest” — and Molly was interviewed by newspapers and the NPR program “All Things Considered.” She told the Florida newspaper The Tallahassee Democrat in 2017 that reflecting on her childhood for “Bandit” had given her an understanding of the enduring psychological destabilization it had caused her.
“I know now that children need consistency to believe in people and to figure out how to have trust and self-esteem,” she said, “so inconsistency is bad for kids, and bad for my sister and I. We didn’t know if one day Dad would be good or bad, if he’d love us or hate us.”
But by her account, writing her memoir had done little to help her understand her father’s actions. “The only thing I’ve learned,” she wrote in an essay for British tabloid The Daily Mail in 2016, “is that there are no easy answers; that simplistic narratives cannot be so easily laid over the messy and unpredictable events of the real world.”
In 2018, Molly earned a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, which she used to travel to Poland for research on another memoir about the fluid nature of nationality, based on her father’s parents, who were killed in the Holocaust. Her husband, Blake Butler has stated that the book, “Alone in Poland,” had not yet found a publisher, but that another book of Ms. Brodak’s poetry, “The Cipher,” is scheduled to be published by Pleiades Press in the fall.
Molly was also an accomplished baker, appearing on “The Great American Baking Show” on ABC in 2019, the same year she started a home baking business called Kookie House. She had a rare gift for blending fine art with an almost scientific love of creating new recipes to make fantastic confections. Her devotion to research and knowledge was clear not only in her writing and baking, but in her approach to the world, the environment, and humanity. She loved nature and caring for animals, especially her chickens. She had a beautiful heart and mind, and truly touched the lives of all who knew her.
In 2020, Molly committed suicide at the age of 39 near her home in Atlanta. She had a history of depression dating back to her childhood. She left behind a wide array of poems, including a book of them called “Folk Physics,” which she sent to her husband on the day she died.
(Bio by The New York Times)
In 2010, she published a collection of poetry called “A Little Middle of the Night” which won the Iowa Poetry Prize. Her poems appeared widely, including in Granta, Poetry magazine, Fence, Map Literary, New York Tyrant, Diode, New Orleans Review, Ninth Letter, Colorado Review, Bateau, and Hayden's Ferry Review. She moved to Atlanta in 2011 to take part in a fellowship at Emory University and teach there. In Georgia, she also taught creative writing, composition, poetry and world literature at Augusta State University, the Savannah College of Art and Design and, most recently, Georgia College and State University.
In 2016, she wrote and released a memoir called “Bandit”, it was an unsparing account of her dysfunctional childhood with her father, Joseph Brodak, a tool and die worker who began robbing banks in the summer of 1994 to pay off his gambling debts. At the time, Molly was barely a teenager. She delivered the broad details of the robberies matter-of-factly before taking a deeply personal look at what it was like to come of age in the environment her father had created.
“The facts are easy to say; I say them all the time,” she wrote early in the book.
“They leave me out. They cover over the trouble like a lid. This isn’t about them.”
The memoir was well-received by critics — Kirkus Reviews called it “intelligent, disturbing and profoundly honest” — and Molly was interviewed by newspapers and the NPR program “All Things Considered.” She told the Florida newspaper The Tallahassee Democrat in 2017 that reflecting on her childhood for “Bandit” had given her an understanding of the enduring psychological destabilization it had caused her.
“I know now that children need consistency to believe in people and to figure out how to have trust and self-esteem,” she said, “so inconsistency is bad for kids, and bad for my sister and I. We didn’t know if one day Dad would be good or bad, if he’d love us or hate us.”
But by her account, writing her memoir had done little to help her understand her father’s actions. “The only thing I’ve learned,” she wrote in an essay for British tabloid The Daily Mail in 2016, “is that there are no easy answers; that simplistic narratives cannot be so easily laid over the messy and unpredictable events of the real world.”
In 2018, Molly earned a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, which she used to travel to Poland for research on another memoir about the fluid nature of nationality, based on her father’s parents, who were killed in the Holocaust. Her husband, Blake Butler has stated that the book, “Alone in Poland,” had not yet found a publisher, but that another book of Ms. Brodak’s poetry, “The Cipher,” is scheduled to be published by Pleiades Press in the fall.
Molly was also an accomplished baker, appearing on “The Great American Baking Show” on ABC in 2019, the same year she started a home baking business called Kookie House. She had a rare gift for blending fine art with an almost scientific love of creating new recipes to make fantastic confections. Her devotion to research and knowledge was clear not only in her writing and baking, but in her approach to the world, the environment, and humanity. She loved nature and caring for animals, especially her chickens. She had a beautiful heart and mind, and truly touched the lives of all who knew her.
In 2020, Molly committed suicide at the age of 39 near her home in Atlanta. She had a history of depression dating back to her childhood. She left behind a wide array of poems, including a book of them called “Folk Physics,” which she sent to her husband on the day she died.
(Bio by The New York Times)
Sponsored by Ancestry
Advertisement
Advertisement
