Molly Brodak

Dad robbed banks one summer.

ut what a marvel to watch him construct bullshit and to finally see it righ

would give anything to see the artifacts again—the actual days I spent with my family—to turn them over in my hands and catalogue their facts with my grown-up faculties.

In the dark, I grew up.

Being a good, hardworking dad and a criminal at the same time is a way of choosing neither.

an addict is already faithfully committed to something he prioritizes above all else.

I’ve always been both suspicious and suspicious of my suspicion when listening to Dad. What if it wasn’t all lies this time? What if he let me in—would I be strong enough to follow?

He seemed to want to let me have my happiness without necessarily sharing in it or talking about it. Perhaps it’s easy to dismiss children’s happinesses because they seem so uninformed.

aybe a person can just be a regular man with problems, who just keeps making increasingly bad choices to cope with the messes from old bad choices, over and over. Does it have to be that he is a sociopath

It’s underappreciated, I think, how quickly children can come to understand how to deal with adults in order to survive