On a recent Friday afternoon, the author Molly Brodak baked a cake. This was not unusual.
On any given day, a cake is part of Molly’s routine. Molly is a poet, both by training and disposition. She writes poems in the mornings, often when she first gets up. After that, she may drive to Kennesaw State University to teach a class, meet with a student worried about an assignment, grade papers, prepare a syllabus. Later in the day, she’ll sit down at her dining-room table to work on her flowers, tiny fragile looking gum-paste sculptures for cake decoration.
At some point, she’ll prepare a jam or clarify butter or blend ganache. Or else she’ll do the actual baking, maybe a gift for a friend or a test of a recipe or a commission for someone’s birthday or wedding or anniversary. Molly has baked cakes this way, her talents recognized by word of mouth, for several years. When her cakes are finished, they are works of exceptional beauty. Somewhere in the midst of this, she finds time to write books.
This month, Grove Atlantic published Molly’s second book, “Bandit: A Daughter’s Memoir.” The memoir concerns her relationship with her father, Joseph Brodak, who robbed 11 banks the summer she turned 13. He is currently serving his second sentence in federal prison.
“Bandit” tells the story of growing up with and without Joseph, of thinking that her father was one person when he was actually another, of learning to recognize his deceptions. Molly makes no effort to appeal to true-crime tropes, there is no lurid recounting of the crimes. In fact, the earliest pages of the book are a simple, bare statement of facts: Dad robbed this bank, Dad robbed that bank, and so on. “There: see? Done with the facts already. … This isn’t about them,” she writes.
Instead, “Bandit” is a book about stories and character, of how events and actions shape who we are, how a father becomes one person, how a daughter grows up to be another.
Joseph was born in 1945 in Germany, in a refugee camp for survivors just liberated from the Nazi camps. His parents were from Poland, rounded up and taken to Dachau. His mother had carried him in secret. They survived somehow, but Joseph’s father died before the family could emigrate to the United States. She sees her father’s longing for his father not unlike her own:
“Aren’t we together on this, Dad, together on missing our dads, and what has it done to you and me? You left an unknowable self behind, with us, your cover story, your dupes, and I kept following, and I’m still following, somehow more than ever, in love with this trouble, this difficult family, in love with my troubled mom and sister and you too, maybe most of all you, the unknowable one.”
For several reasons, this is not the book that Molly ever hoped to write.
Photo: Molly does most of her writing sitting on the bed in the guestroom in her home in the Ormewood Park neighborhood of Atlanta.
4
Her story to tell
In graduate school, Molly brought a poem she’d written about her family into a writing workshop. It was unlike her other work at the time. The words were raw and emotional, as if bubbled up intact from a deep well of pressure inside. Her peers didn’t know what to make of it. The events didn’t seem real, they said. Would anyone believe such a thing? Even if it were plausible, so what? one student said. The poem is just poor, poor me, my poor, sad life, blah blah–
These words are the ones she heard every time she began to consider writing about her life again.
Her ambitions were different.
“I always wanted to be a male poet. I wanted to be Robert Bly, the tough guy who would not be writing about flowers and love and your child. I wanted to be the male poet who could tackle America or concepts or things that were traditionally associated with male writers. They’re allowed to write about the big ideas. I loved that.”
Her first book, “A Little Middle of the Night,” began that career. The collection was awarded the Iowa Poetry Prize in 2010. She got a job teaching at Augusta State University and then a prestigious fellowship at Emory University.
After the quick, early success of her first book, Molly struggled.
“I was not writing very well for a long time,” she said. In the years since, she has finished five collections of poems but published none of them. The conversation in poetry was changing and she struggled to find her place in it. She wrote a book of poems about holograms and the idea, pushed forward by some theoretical physicists, that our universe resembles one. She wrote poems about an early Spanish explorer of North America.
What she knew she didn’t want to write about was her father. She’d gotten used to telling it. Every time she’d get close to someone and tell about her father, she could see the same reaction. “People always wanted to hear a kind of glamorous story about bank robbery and mystery and the reason why. They always want to know why would he do that,” she said.
A few years ago, that changed. In Atlanta, she started dating another writer, the transgressive novelist Blake Butler (“Three Hundred Million”; “Nothing: A Memoir of Insomnia”) and, in the course of their conversations, he encouraged her to write about her father.
“It’s such a boring story,” she said. “I could tell it in five minutes. There’s not really a book here.”
“Well,” he said, “just say what you really want to say about it then.”
With the time granted her by the fellowship at Emory, she threw herself into the book, rejecting all the versions of the story that people seemed to want, rejecting all the lurid interest and the useless questions about why. Shortly after finishing the manuscript, the agent Bill Clegg picked it up. The literary magazine Granta published an excerpt. Foreign editions of the book were sold in England and Germany, and Grove Press published it earlier this month.
The two writers are engaged to marry next year.
5
Defining characteristics
“Bandit” is in many ways an investigation. As with the form of memoir, Molly explores the scraps and threads of her memories, the little details and images and events that have become the sum of her life. She also pushes forward, traveling and asking questions and learning ways to fathom her own life.
She goes to Detroit and visits St. Albertus Church, the place that sheltered her father when he came to the United States as a refugee. What she finds is beautiful and haunting, an abandoned building ornate with the flaws of decay. She visits a giant casino and, instead of being seduced by the promises of chance that possessed her father, finds herself meditating on the nature of money.
She asks questions of her family, discovers traumatic details of her mother’s past, connects with her sister, examines the way that all three of them have coped with their relationships to Joseph. Molly is an unsparing observer. She accepts no easy explanation, plays along with no excuse. She interrogates her own teenage habit of shoplifting, leaving not even herself unindicted.
In particular, she takes that old, tired phrase, “out of character,” and accepts no such thing. “Character,” she writes, “is exactly defined by the actions one takes – especially in crisis.” Those poetic fragments and shards, the short images that accumulate the many brief chapters of the book, become an accrued inventory of character, the actions that she and her family have chosen to take in the wake of their own traumas.
It is a book that in no way resembles, say, a newspaper summary of the same events.
“The book partly was for me to say, that’s not right. There’s no easy answer. He doesn’t know why he did it. I don’t know. I don’t know if we’ll ever know him really. I think we know him as well as anyone will know him, which is not very much. People are very hard to know.”
But she knows him enough.
“When my dad robbed 10 banks one summer, I didn’t see it as out of character. I saw it as something he was definitely capable of doing,” she said.
In Molly’s character, this lesson has not been lost on her. She can be seen in the sum of the work that guides her every day: the advice and lessons she lends to her students, the poems that accumulate on her pages, the books that she writes, the cakes that she bakes.
The last step Molly took that afternoon was icing the cake. Between the layers she spread apricot jam, orange and sticky. Once the layers were set, she spread on a thick, dark brown chocolate ganache. For this step, Molly used a wide, heavy-duty paint scraper, the kind of thing you’d buy at a hardware store, and a spinning wheel. She crouched down, eye level with the cake, wielding the two tools like a craftsman of furniture, until the imperfections were erased, the sides smooth, sharp and clean.
Asked what she thinks about when she bakes, Molly paused for a long stretch of silence.
“Baking, for me, is not thinking,” she said. “It is a loss of self.”
She paused again, seeming to think of another way to explain, and wondered aloud if I’d ever read a book called “Flow” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
“He had this idea that artists and musicians can get into this state of flow, where there is a complete loss of self-awareness. Like, Marshawn Lynch describes that he can’t even hear the crowd during a football game. Baking’s kind of like that for me. I don’t think about myself. I’m not anxious. I’m not worried about my story or my problems. It is a kind of submission. For someone who is not religious, I think it is a healthy thing to submit once in a while to something greater than you, even if it is just butter.”
Near the end of “Bandit,” Molly writes about another kind of submission, the way her father surrendered himself to the blackjack table, “to the trustworthy outcomes of gambling, to give over completely to the simple rhythm and singular focus of its movements.” She knows what submission looks like. She has chosen to find hers among the butter and the eggs and the flour.
On the kitchen counter, the cake was done.
ABOUT THE STORY
The events of Molly Brodak’s life are hard for me to fathom. I can’t imagine living through them, surviving them the way she has. The thing that compelled me as a writer to tell her story was the way she distilled those experiences into such a strong book. “Bandit” (see review next Sunday) is a terribly honest, beautiful thing. I hope people who read this story go find a copy and read it for themselves.
Wyatt Williams
Freelance writer
personaljourneys@ajc.com
ABOUT THE REPORTER
Wyatt Williams is a dining critic for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. His work has been published by The Paris Review, Oxford American, Los Angeles Review of Books, Vice, BuzzFeed, Eater and many other publications. He is at work on a book about meat.
ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHER
Bob Andres joined the AJC in 1998. Born in San Francisco, he has held photography and photo editing positions in California, Florida and Georgia. A journalism graduate of San Francisco State University, Andres has also worked as the AJC’s metro photo editor, Sports photo editor and has taught photojournalism at UGA and Cal State Hayward.
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