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, the New York Times reported. She was 39. Before Brodak published Bandit: A Daughter's Memoir (2016), her poems appeared in Granta, Guernica and Poetry, among others, and in her collection, A Little Middle of the Night (2010), which won the Iowa Poetry Prize.
Bandit "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," the Times noted.
"The facts are easy to say; I say them all the time," she wrote in the book. "They leave me out. They cover over the trouble like a lid. This isn't about them." In a 2016 essay for the Daily Mail, she observed: "The only thing I've learned 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."
An accomplished baker, she appeared on ABC's The Great American Baking Show in 2019, the same year she started a home baking business called Kookie House.
In 2018, Brodak earned a National Endowment for the Arts grant, "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," the Times noted. While that book, Alone in Poland, had not yet found a publisher, another collection of her poetry, The Cipher, was scheduled to be published by Pleiades Press this fall.
From her poem "In the Morning, Before Anything Bad Happens":
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.