Bandit: A Daughter's Memoir

Molly Brodak

oct 2016 · Open Road + Grove/Atlantic

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One woman’s “raw, poetic and compulsively readable” account of growing up with a bank robber for a father (Kathryn Stockett, author of The Help).
 
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. Dubbed the “Mario Brothers Bandit” by the FBI, he served seven years in prison and was released, only to rob another bank several years later and end up back behind bars.
 
In her powerful and provocative memoir, Molly Brodak recounts her childhood and attempts to make sense of her complicated relationship with her father, a man she only half knew. At some angles he was a normal father: there was a job at the GM factory, a house with a yard, birthday treats for Molly and her sister. But there were darker glimmers, too: another wife he never mentioned to her mother, late-night rages directed at the TV, the red Corvette that suddenly appeared in the driveway, a gift for her sister. In Bandit, Brodak unearths and reckons with 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.
 
“With unwavering candor and remarkable grace, Brodak pieces together the years she spent trying to make sense of a volatile, complicated man her family never really knew.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (online)
 
“A poet by training, Brodak writes with great precision and grace, distilling some memories, expanding others; many of her short chapters feel like prose poems.” —The Boston Globe

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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.