“Bandit: A Daughter’s Memoir” by Molly Brodak

A review and analysis

The way I came to read “Bandit: A Daughter’s Memoir” by Molly Brodak is that I read her obituary in The New York Times. Suicide at age 39 on March 8, 2020, just a few weeks short of her 40th birthday. “Bandit” is her straight-up account of her gambling-addicted, bank-robbing psycho father and her narcissistic bi-polar pyscho mother. Her mother essentially wished her into oblivion by telling her to her face that she should have left her father after her older sister was born. My mother essentially told me the same thing by saying she wished she never met my father. Molly, despite all the abuse she took, decided to stick around and play the role of the good daughter that society expects. Or maybe there was some other reason. Or maybe poets like abuse. What she should have done is emotionally cut them off. In some situations, it’s important to realize the only person you’re capable of saving is yourself. My reading of the book is that Molly continuing an emotional connection to people who had no problem betraying her time and again was a big mistake. I kept telling her to get out of there, but it didn’t do any good. Even her older sister rejected their father and cut off communication. Had Molly done the same thing and simply recognized they were crappy parents and rejected them she would probably still be alive. This is all amateur psychology, of course, so it’s possible that wasn’t it at all. But she sure dwelled on it a lot. She seemed to be searching for answers through the whole book. Always looking for the “Why?”. But sometimes there is no “Why?” and the truth is you’re just dealing with people whose default setting is to behave badly. And that’s the best they can do and there might not even be mitigating circumstances. Sometimes, you’re an OK person, Molly, and it’s people around you who make you feel bad who are the ones who are off-kilter and should, at the very least, not be taken seriously.