Molly Brodak, poet and memoirist of her father's crimes, dies at 39
The First Art Newspaper on the Net    Established in 1996 Friday, November 22, 2024


Molly Brodak, poet and memoirist of her father's crimes, dies at 39
Molly Brodak, a poet who chronicled the trauma she experienced as the child of a compulsive liar and bank robber in a critically acclaimed memoir, died on March 8, 2020, near her home in Atlanta. She was 39. Blake Butler via The New York Times.

by Daniel E. Slotnik



NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Molly Brodak, a poet who chronicled the trauma she experienced as the child of a compulsive liar and bank robber in a critically acclaimed memoir, died March 8 near her home in Atlanta. She was 39.

Her husband, Blake Butler, said the cause was suicide and that Brodak had a history of depression dating back to childhood.

Before Brodak published “Bandit: A Daughter’s Memoir” in 2016, her poems appeared in publications like Granta, Guernica and Poetry and in a book, “A Little Middle of the Night” (2010), which won the Iowa Poetry Prize.

Many of her poems were spare and mysterious. One of them, “In the Morning, Before Anything Bad Happens,” reads in part:

I know there is a river somewhere,

lit, fragrant, golden mist, all that,

-

whose irrepressible birds

can’t believe their luck this morning

and every morning.

-

I let them riot

in my mind a few minutes more

before the news comes.

“Bandit,” her first published nonfiction work, 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.

Joseph Brodak robbed 11 banks in and around Detroit that summer. He would hand a teller a note demanding cash and gesture that he had a gun in his jacket pocket (he didn’t). He wore a floppy hat and a fake mustache that earned him the sobriquet “the Super Mario Brothers Bandit,” after the similarly attired video game character. He was caught, spent seven years in prison and was released in 2001, then served another prison sentence for robbing more banks in 2009.

Brodak 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.”

She and her sister, Rebecca, were subject to the fallout from her father’s gambling and lying. She wrote, for instance, that he had married their mother, Nora Tavalieri, while he was still married to another woman, with whom he had a daughter.

Rebecca coped with her father by acting out and seeking attention, while Molly took a different tack: “One survival technique is to get small,” she wrote.

“I kept quiet, was good and smart and secret and neat, reading and playing alone, catching bugs, collecting rocks, reading and drawing,” she continued. “And I wanted to become even less, a nothing, because I thought they could all at least have that, this one non-problem in the house.”

“Bandit” was well-received by critics — Kirkus Reviews called it “intelligent, disturbing and profoundly honest” — and Brodak 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 the 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.”

Molly Aviva Brodak was born in Detroit on March 29, 1980, and grew up in Rochester, Michigan. Her father worked for General Motors and other manufacturers, and her mother was a therapist.

They married and divorced twice, most recently in 1988, and Brodak lived primarily with her mother while her sister lived mainly with their father.

Brodak 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. 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. An accomplished baker, she appeared on “The Great American Baking Show” on ABC in 2019, the same year she started a home baking business called Kookie House.

She married Butler in 2017. An earlier marriage to Matthew Porter ended in divorce.

In addition to her husband, survivors include her mother; her sister, now Rebecca Gale; and her father, whom she saw briefly after he was released from prison last year.

In 2018, Brodak 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. Butler said that the book, “Alone in Poland,” had not yet found a publisher, but that another book of Brodak’s poetry, “The Cipher,” was scheduled to be published by Pleiades Press in the fall.

Brodak left behind many more poems, Butler said, including a book of them called “Folk Physics,” which she sent him on the day she died, and which he hopes to publish.

© 2020 The New York Times Company










Today's News

March 21, 2020

America's big museums on the hot seat

The British Museum sees surge in online visitors as museums across the world close their doors

Romare Bearden's rarely seen abstract side

Postponed galas imperil more than boldface names

Boca Raton Museum of Art launches new online community initiatives

Sotheby's shifts select March & April sales to online auctions

France closes esplanades, lawns, river banks in virus lockdown

Doriot Anthony Dwyer, flutist and orchestral pathbreaker, dies at 98

Bruneau & Co. Auctioneers to host a spring comic book & toy auction

Lyle Waggoner, a tv star as actor and announcer, dies at 84

Early coastal scene by landmark Australian painter goes five times over estimate at Ewbank's

Russian theatre's solution to virus: an audience of one

New, free 'Sculpting Lives' podcast series exploring British women sculptor

Netflix commits $100 mn to help actors, crews thrown out of work

Flamenco dancers who 'move between genders'

Dancing with myself: Ballet stars stay on their toes in virus lockdown

Jaynelle Hazard appointed Executive Director & Curator of the Greater Reston Arts Center

For this pianist, every album is an essay

An opera singer goes from tenor to soprano, and her career takes off

Digital programme: 'Dispatches' from Hauser & Wirth, launches this weekend

Congolese music star Mabele dies of coronavirus

Molly Brodak, poet and memoirist of her father's crimes, dies at 39

Almine Rech presents an exhibition of works by Alexandre Lenoir

Cirque du Soleil lays off most of its workforce over pandemic

How to remove Watermarks from Images

Tips for Creating the Perfect Sketch

Career Tips for Photographers: How to Create the Perfect Portfolio

Chris Ware at MCA Chicago

Bonhams travels with style as vintage luxury luggage goes under the hammer

Jacket worn by Prince in "Purple Rain" to be sold by auction house Profiles in History




Museums, Exhibits, Artists, Milestones, Digital Art, Architecture, Photography,
Photographers, Special Photos, Special Reports, Featured Stories, Auctions, Art Fairs,
Anecdotes, Art Quiz, Education, Mythology, 3D Images, Last Week, .

 



Founder:
Ignacio Villarreal
(1941 - 2019)
Editor & Publisher: Jose Villarreal
Art Director: Juan José Sepúlveda Ramírez
Writer: Ofelia Zurbia Betancourt

Attorneys
Truck Accident Attorneys
Accident Attorneys
Holistic Dentist
Abogado de accidentes
สล็อต
สล็อตเว็บตรง

Royalville Communications, Inc
produces:

ignaciovillarreal.org juncodelavega.com facundocabral-elfinal.org
Founder's Site. Hommage
to a Mexican poet.
Hommage
       

The First Art Newspaper on the Net. The Best Versions Of Ave Maria Song Junco de la Vega Site Ignacio Villarreal Site Parroquia Natividad del Señor
Tell a Friend
Dear User, please complete the form below in order to recommend the Artdaily newsletter to someone you know.
Please complete all fields marked *.
Sending Mail
Sending Successful