Bandit, by author Molly Brodak, is a heartbreaking piece of literature. Heartbreaking in its subject matter and in the legacy it is part of. The book is a memoir of Brodak’s life and family, specifically her father. A product of suburban life outside of Detroit, Brodak’s family was disrupted and fractured when her father was arrested for bank robbery when she and her sister were young. Stemming from the arrest, the family learned that the father had been living a secret life of gambling and theft, and the repercussions of these things changed the lives of the family members forever.
Told with a detached gaze, this isn’t a memoir that spends time moaning about the unfairness of the world, or the system, or even a parent; instead, it simply tells the story of a family and its very public secrets. The book intersperses the past with the present and shows glimpses of the author behind the curtain, a look that also spares no flowers for the light of truth. As the author reckons with who her father is, it becomes clear that the deeper question isn’t Who is My Father but Who Am I?
Brodak finds parallels in who she is, and what she has done in her past with what her father has done. It feels as if there is a yearning behind the words to make sense of her past and her present, asking questions many of us often ask ourselves in the late hours of the night.
The author is very conscious of the dangerous waters she treads with the book as family members question why she is writing about their private business. It’s only in this light, though, that she seems able to try to exorcise the demons of her past. This is not a book meant to demonize her father but to humanize him, to remind herself that he harmed not just her but her sister, her mother, and himself.
There is resilience here, though. The daughters, while struggling, find their ways. Their mother moves on. Even the father moves on in his life to find love and a partner who is willing to stand by him as he serves yet another prison term. The book is not meant to shame a man who faltered but to remind us that we all falter and have to keep working to be better than those failings.
There is, though, a sad postscript to the book, unwritten between its pages, but still true.
I met Molly Aviva Brodak a long, long time ago.
I was hanging out in downtown Flint at an all-ages music venue with a friend in the late winter of the late 90s. My friend saw Molly inside and thought she was cute but didn’t have the nerve to speak to her. I had no investment, so I went and did speak to her. Molly was terribly charming and was a fellow ‘zine creator. Her ‘zine, Flabby Arms, was something she produced on her own with some content from her mother. The ‘zine, like Molly, was funny, charming, and took an honest look at the world.
Molly and I became quick friends and hung out a few times over the next few months. Heck, I still remember going over to her mom’s place and how she was very sad to see her goldfish had died and so we went to a nearby woods to bury it.
While our friendship didn’t last – and I can’t even tell you what happened to it other than to say it just faded away – she was someone who stuck with me. Once in a while, I would look her up online and was happy to see how well she’d done.
Looking her up now, it’s awe-inspiring.
Molly was a beloved professor, renowned poet, baker, had been a finalist on The Great American Baking Show, she was a friend, a sister, a daughter, and a wife.
And it’s that last part that’s sadly become the bright neon sign beneath her name.
The irony of Bandit is that Molly dared to write about a very intimate and private matter and to make it public in a book. She dragged family skeletons out into the light for the world to see. She didn’t seem to have done it for the same nastiness but because she needed that light to be able to see the minutiae of her father, family, and herself. So, too, then did her husband pull Molly’s skeletons out of the closet for the world to see in his own memoir about her after her 2020 suicide.
I imagine she might have laughed, not at the humor in it but at the irony of becoming served on a similar platter to what you had dissected your own family and life. Where her dissection came from a place of love though, I can’t say I’d ever buy that her husband’s memoir came from anything but a place of rage.
Knowing what end was to befall Molly, it’s heartwrenching to read Bandit and to see the crumbs of it all. The talk of depression, alienation, doubt, and dealing with the legacy of one’s deeds. There is an ugliness, too in virtually unburying the recently dead to parade them and their flaws and trespasses for all to see. I don’t see that releasing something so recent to the person’s death you are writing about can be anything but full of hurt, anger, and questions that no one has answers to.
I am sorry for Molly and for what she must have gone through on her road to her end and at the end. I have lost friends to suicide and have suffered from suicidal ideation since I was a teen, and it’s a desperately lonely thing to go through. I cannot fault Molly’s husband for his anger or his hurt, but to turn around and weaponize it in a memoir is self-serving at best and abhorrent at worst. Then, to do a book tour as the mourning husband who was betrayed is but a pound of salt on that open wound.
I ache for Molly’s family, who had to live with her loss, and then I reckon with more infamy from this new book.
The dead don’t get to write their stories; the living do, but at least we aren’t around to hear the tales they tell. It’s clear that Molly struggled with who she was, even to the end. I don’t envy a partner having to parse through the ashes of a loved and finding they had more sides to them than you could ever have imagined. Artists process grief through their art. That’s how we have to do it. I just wonder if there aren’t better ways to try to exorcize our own demons than to build them a stage for the world to see them.
I remember when a book of diary entries from Kurt Cobain were released and how scandalous his inner-most thoughts were. I look at the memoir about Molly in the same way – some things weren’t meant for us. Not all shows are meant to be for the public. I read Sylvia Plath’s book of diary entries and it bothered me. Still does. We do deserve some inch of space just for ourselves. Some place where others don’t get to look. In the world of the internet and saturated information though, I suppose that’s a silly thought to have.
Bandit is a brilliant work, and sadly, one that shows how much we may have gotten from an author finding their voice just before it ceased altogether. I didn’t know Molly very well, not very well at all, but I knew her a little and am glad for it and for the light, she put out in the world with that million-watt smile, her acerbic humor, and her heart that was just too big for this world.
4 out of 5
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