Molly Kochan didn’t plan to have a sexual awakening at 42. She was married to someone she loved, even if their relationship wasn’t perfect, and she’d
Molly Kochan didn’t plan to have a sexual awakening at 42. She was married to someone she loved, even if their relationship wasn’t perfect, and she’d craved structure and stability since childhood. Then, in 2015, her hip started hurting. Just to be sheltered, she got a biopsy. She was in a couple’s counseling session when her doctor called to tell Molly that she had stage IV breast cancer that had spread to her bones, brain, and liver—a terminal diagnosis.
There are plenty of stories of how cancer upends people’s lives, inspiring them to rethink their priorities. But when she found out she might only have a few years to live, Molly didn’t go skydiving. Instead, she decided to finally figure out what turned her on, kinks included. “My sexual exploration was a way of saying, ‘I’m not ready to die,’” she said later on her podcast, Dying for Sex, hosted by her best friend, Nikki Boyer. “I can live a life feeling like I gave it my all.” Later, she joked that if she met a commitment-phobe, she might be just their gal.
It’s that mix of poignancy and murky humor, along with Molly and Nikki’s no-holds-barred honesty, that makes the podcast linger long after its last episode. Now FX is bringing it to the compact screen with an eponymous eight-episode narrow series, premiering April 4 on Hulu. Before settling in to watch Michelle Williams (as Molly) and Jenny Slate (as Nikki) face the abyss—a relationship that is “more passionate than people give it credit for,” Williams recently told VF’s David Canfield—here’s everything you need to know about the too-brief life of the real Molly Kochan.
“Cancer Is Not a Gift”
Molly was the child of a well-to-do mother and a blue-collar father who met at a concert and got hitched after Molly was conceived, forming what she’d call in her memoir a “family of strangers.” The union was short-lived, and after her parents divorced, her dad left New York and moved to LA, where he eventually became the manager of the bands REO Speedwagon and Survivor, known for the hit “Eye of the Tiger.” While her mother’s family provided financial security, her mom struggled with cocaine addiction and anxiety, setting the stage for a lifetime of tension. “We were both fragments…hoping to fit into each other to feel whole,” Molly wrote in her memoir, Screw Cancer: Becoming Whole.
Then came a nightmare that would change her life forever. The summer she turned seven, her mother’s then boyfriend molested Molly while her mother was passed out in the bedroom, drugged on something he’d slipped into her drink. It was a trauma that would take Molly over 35 years to process. To cope, she split in two, becoming a person of “opposites”: someone who wanted to be seen, but not looked at; someone who wanted to connect, but feared intimacy. As an adult, sex for her meant dissociation. “I’d physically go through the motions but would never orgasm or even fake one,” she wrote.
Molly became addicted to the power sex gave her, pursuing men who were either “unsupportive or smothering,” she wrote. When she eventually married, it was to someone “controlling.” In her husband (played in the series by Jay Duplass), Molly believed she’d finally found a person who was large enough “to hide behind.” The problem was that she was really hiding from herself. Molly credited that revelation to her cancer: Its ticking clock forced her to reckon with her past and consider what mark she wanted to make on the world before leaving it. At the same time, she maintained that “cancer is not a gift.”
In 2005, now living in LA, Molly made an appointment with her gynecologist, worried about a pea-sized lump in her breast. Her doctor dismissed her concern, Molly later wrote, telling her she was “too young” to have breast cancer. But she did have it—and it wasn’t formally diagnosed until 2011, when she began chemotherapy and had a mastectomy. A period of remission followed. After losing her breasts and learning she could not have children, Molly said on the podcast, she felt “sexually irrelevant.” More than anything, she craved physical intimacy.
At the same time, the hormone medication she took—which typically diminishes libido—had the opposite effect on Molly. “I wanted to hump everything and everyone,” she told Nikki on their podcast. “I had my hands down my pants all the time.” But after years of pushing her husband away, he was uninterested in having sex with her. “I don’t blame him,” Molly said. So she began connecting with balmy strangers online instead.
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