BANDIT
By Molly Brodak
Grove Atlantic, October 4, 2016
In the summer of 1994, when Molly Brodak was thirteen years old, her father robbed eleven banks, until the police finally caught up with him while he was sitting at a bar drinking beer, a bag of stolen money plainly visible in the backseat of his parked car.
In her powerful, provocative debut memoir, Bandit, Molly Brodak recounts her childhood and attempts to make sense of her complicated relationship with her father, a man she only half knew. In Bandit, she unearths and reckons with her childhood memories and the fracturing impact her father had on their family—and in the process attempts to make peace with the parts of herself that she inherited from this bewildering, beguiling man.
Selected Praise
“Raw, poetic and compulsively readable. In Molly Brodak’s dazzling memoir, Bandit, her eye is so honest, I found myself nodding like I was agreeing with her, sometimes cringing at what she sustained, and laughing—often. I can’t wait to buy a copy for everyone I know.”—Kathryn Stockett, author of The Help
"Molly Brodak's account of growing up as the daughter of a multiple felon bank robber is one of the most astonishing memoirs I've ever read, an unflinching look into the meaning of family, morality, forgiveness. It provides an eye into the more personal side of the criminal mind, asking the biggest questions about what makes us who we are, whether we really know the things we think we know. We've all read the true crime accounts of man's personal depravity, but never has there been one telling this side of the story, at least not one armed with such patience, poetry, humanity. This is a rare one.”—Blake Butler
About the Author
Molly Brodak is from Michigan and currently lives in Georgia. Her poems have recently appeared in Field, The Kenyon Review, Ninth Letter, and Colorado Review. Her first book of poetry, A Little Middle of the Night, won the 2009 Iowa Poetry Prize.