EXCLUSIVE: 'Molly's story is a tragedy that needs to be told': Author Blake Butler lays bare his wife's suicide in heartbreaking and graphic detail in his new book - and now hopes his words will help others who are suffering

Author Blake Butler has revealed his heartbreaking reason for penning a novel about his poet wife Molly Brodak's suicide, hoping his ordeal might help others to 'just hang on' through hard times. 

Brodak, an award-winning writer and former star contestant on the Great American Baking Show, took her own life on March 8, 2020, in Atlanta, Georgia after being diagnosed with a brain tumor and succumbing to years of mental health battles. 

Blake told DailyMail.com that after three years of grieving, he hopes that publishing his cathartic memories of her death and details of her struggle could help others looking for light at the end of the tunnel.  

'You shouldn't have to lose your life to feel like you have a place in the world,' he said, noting that despite his wife's renowned literary success, she felt 'inadequate'. 

'Antagonizing yourself into living in this kind of torpor between reality that other people see and the reality that you live in can really put you in a place where you don't want to live anymore.'

His nonfiction book about her suicide, simply titled 'Molly', is set to be published on December 5.  

For the first time, Butler has revealed in graphic, visceral detail Molly's final moments, which came after he left for his everyday morning run on one spring morning.

Molly had been in a deep depression, and was reading silently in their bedroom in a distant stupor. After trying to cheer her up by holding one of their pet chickens to her window, he wrote she simply stared blankly, 'her eyes like dents obscured against the glare across the dimness of the room.'

As he jogged his normal running route through the neighborhood, Blake had no idea his wife was leaving her suicide note in the front door for him to find when he returned. 

In her opening lines, he reveals, she told him: 'Blake. I have decided to leave this world.'

Choosing to shoot herself to make the act as quick and painless as possible, Molly told him she had gone to a forested area they used to take walks together.

The discovery led Blake on a frantic chase to find her that he described as 'moving through somewhere so far beyond adrenaline it felt like the world had finally actually gone flat, my blood replaced with poison, being dragged.'

Butler, the author of several thriller novels, uses graphic, visceral language to describe the moment his life was destroyed, a decision he said he made as he was solely focused on telling the brutal truth.

'There are certainly things in the book that are hard to talk about, but I trusted that it felt like the right thing to say, even if it was extreme for others,' he said. 'It should be extreme, it was an extreme situation.'

Nowhere was this uncompromising take on the tragedy seen more heavily than in his own battle to stay alive in the days after Molly's death, which he wrote felt 'at once compulsory and impossible.' 

'Like all there’d ever be left to expect at best was treading neck-deep in blood that looked like water, with a black bag over my head, its fabric lined with mural-style dioramas of the scene of Molly’s suicide inscribed into them, interlaced with miles of smoke,' he wrote. 

Blake said the early days were 'chaos' in his mind, and as an author he did all he could think to do - write. 

'I knew I wanted to write something, I knew I had something to say and I had a lot of anger,' he told DailyMail.com. 'The early versions of the book were personal, a lot more like brain dumping.'

The author said as he wrote more and more, he realized that the story was not just one of Molly's death, but of 'a relationship, and my own experience of mourning and grief. 

'The book mutated into something that I realized had a public purpose,' Blake added. 

Brodak won legions of fans with her poetry, and appeared to live a fulfilling life as a writer - featuring in Daily Mail's You magazine - and baker. 

But behind closed doors, Butler offers a heartbreaking look at her last days when she struggled to even get out of bed. 

'Molly on the front looked like she had her stuff together, and she was almost afraid to confront parts of herself because she thought no one would like it in her anymore,' he said.  

'I see Molly's story as a tragedy - I felt her story needed to be told and had a purpose in the world for others who are in a similar situation to her.' 

After the shock of her loss wore off, he said one of the most valuable lessons was learning to accept help from others, despite his trust being shattered. 

'When Molly died, that was not just something I could stand up from on my own,' Butler continued. 'I had to allow people into my home, and I had to trust people with my emotions.' 

While initially writing about the tragedy for catharsis, Butler said he hopes the long journey to eventually deciding to publish the book could help others who may relate to his struggle.  

'Tragedy and trauma are completely disorientating to each person and it takes time,' he said when asked about advice for others who may be in a similar situation.

'You might need to buckle down and just eat cr** for a while, but you will get better and you will start to adjust.' 

Looking back, he said there were signs that Molly had a darkness inside her, including her remarking one time that 'if there was ever a gun in this house, I would end up using it on myself.' 

'That would be a shocking thing for most people to hear, but for me coming from having read her poetry and how she processed things... it wasn't a threat,' he said, adding that they bonded over their shared 'morbid humor'.

'We shared an intimacy over the darkness of the world,' he said.  

Despite her success as an author and award-winning poet, Molly's tragic suicide note detailed how she 'never even came close to achieving anything I wanted in my heart' and felt how she 'simply wasn't good enough.'

Blake said he wished he had told her more often of her brilliance, as she 'never gave herself any rope', and 'any good thing that happened just went in one ear and out the other.' 

Blake's upcoming book offers an unflinching glimpse into the darkness that consumed Molly in her final weeks, publishing her last diary entries to show how she was secretly struggling behind their regular-looking life.

An excerpt said: 'Took a bath, said goodbye to my body. We ate grilled halloumi and made love after dinner and watched our favorite things on TV.

'Feel like I can see everything with such clarity this morning. I've been pretending my entire life.'

Molly had battled a lifetime of trauma and suffered from depression from an early age, which she partly attributed to her father Joseph Brodak's history as a bank robber. 

She detailed her issues with her father's time in prison in her memoir 'Bandit', where she noted how she was just 13 when her seemingly ordinary childhood shattered. 

Her father was sent to prison in 1994 for a string of bank robberies in and around Detroit, because he had been struggling to pay off gambling debts so decided to carry out heists on 11 banks in the area.

Joseph would hand bank tellers a note saying he had a gun in his pocket - even though he didn't - and that they should hand over cash.

In a gut-wrenching essay for the Daily Mail in 2016, Molly questioned her whole family life and memories of her father, concluding that in life 'there are no easy answers.' 

'Did Dad love us? Or were we just his cover? Or just in his way? For years I wrote to him in prison through the official correctional department email service,' Molly wrote.

'I visited him a few times, trying to analyze his face for the truth. But he gave me the same stories he gave everyone else. I came away with no new information.

'I realize Dad is – like so many of us – an irreducibly complex person, and I guess I'll have to be satisfied with that,' she said.

Blake's writing comes across almost as a relief to him, a way of releasing the pent-up rage that he says had once driven him into alcoholism. 

He said he was consumed by 'anger' after her suicide, including at her for leaving him to discover her body and sear the memory in his mind. 

'Leaving it all out for me to find like that,' he wrote. 'How she'd made sure I'd be the one to go and find her body, was another kind of violence on its own.' 

However, speaking to DailyMail.com he concluded that her memory is fueling a renewed passion for his writing and to live his life, something he openly writes about considering ending in the days after she died. 

'My relationship with (Molly) has grown out of tragedy and erased a lot of the confusion that was there, and now I feel almost more resolved than ever to make my life have that purpose that extends that conversation,' he said. 

'I can't be the person I was before I met her, and especially before her death.

'There is valor in telling your story,' Blake concluded. 'Just try to hang on.'