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 safe, 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 dark 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 small screen with an eponymous eight-episode limited 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 big 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 hot strangers online instead.
There’s an art to the sexy cancer selfie, Molly explained in the podcast’s first episode. “Get rid of anything hospital—tubes, machines, that pilled robe, anything that screams medical…. A deliberate hand lying over a breast scar. It’s the art of suggestion.” Taking photos in lingerie allowed her to slide into an alternate reality, one in which she wasn’t in pain. Men were generous with their feedback, telling her how beautiful she looked, helping her connect with her body and feel pleasure. When she guiltily confessed her assignations to her husband, he replied, “Good for you.”
By 2015, she thought she was in the clear. In her memoir, she wrote about the very different responses she and her husband had when they heard about her terminal diagnosis at counseling: Molly crumpled to the floor. Her husband cooly said, “Can we get back to why I’m so angry?”
On the podcast, Nikki said she was shocked when Molly told her she was separating from her husband after receiving a terminal diagnosis. “Most people go, ‘Oh my God, I need safety and security,’ and you did the direct opposite.” But Molly said she knew she had no choice.
“A Different Kind of Sexuality”
When Molly made the jump from digital sexual partners to real ones, her first forays were sweetly adolescent. She told Nikki about the “hot mechanic” with whom she made out in someone else’s car: “Still the best kisser,” she said. And then there was “Toyota guy,” a 20-something she met up with at a local bar before they found themselves entwined in the backseat of his Corolla—again, making out. Only this time, the guy’s pants came off, and when Molly’s pinky “touched it,” it was apparently “too much.” What happened next is straight out of a raunchy rom-com. (Toyota guy, an aspiring screenwriter, eventually wrote it into a script; the moment also makes its way into episode two of Dying for Sex.) “You knew something was going to happen, and it was going to happen sooner than either of us were prepared for it to happen,” Molly explained.
Following these semi-innocent capers, Molly ventured into decidedly more uncharted territory. She saw her encounters as a collaboration—an opportunity to get creative with another person. There was a beautiful German model whose kink was “foot worship,” who complimented her by saying, “I could look at pictures of your feet all day.” She told Nikki about walking barefoot across his face and chest while he lay naked, staring up lovingly at her. Then Molly crammed her toes into his expectant mouth and ordered him to lick them. “It’s empowering. A different kind of sexuality,” she said of the experience.
And then there was “pee play guy,” who expressed his interest thusly: “I want to drink you.” On the podcast, Molly remembered her reply: “Well, as long as I don’t have to drink you, sure.”
Perhaps her most extreme encounter was with a guy who asked her to kick him in the testicles. “I was intrigued,” Molly told Nikki. When they met up at a coffee shop, his face took her aback: “He’s gorgeous. He looks like this movie star…. It’s uncanny.” And when they finally got around to the kicking, “it was amazing,” Molly said. “It was like an amusement park built for me with one ride, and that was the ride, and there was no line, so I’m going to do it again and again.”
At one point, Molly and Nikki counted 188 sexual contacts in her phone; eventually, they lost track of her partners. Nikki sometimes expressed concern about her friend: Was she being taken advantage of? Was she safe? But those were her fears, not Molly’s. “What, are [they] gonna kill me? I’m dying,” Molly said on the podcast.
“I’m Fucking Excited”
In December 2018, Molly returned to the hospital for a stay she figured would last a week or two. But after having breathing issues, she was moved to the ICU and intubated. At that point, although she didn’t know it, Molly was only a few months from death. But her humor remained undimmed. If anything, she became funnier, as the podcast shows. Nikki remembered how Molly, who couldn’t speak, wrote her very young-looking doctor a note: “Do you have a permission slip from your parents to be here?”
But she was also beginning to “unlink” from the everyday world. Trying to watch new episodes of the show Charmed, for instance, disoriented her. On another occasion, she had a hallucinatory vision. “All the shit came off the walls and started rotating around the room—and specifically the clock. And I was like, Oooh. I always knew time wasn’t linear, but the stuff that you think grounds you to this place, it’s not even grounded to itself,” she remembered on the podcast. She also had to let go of her hard-won sexual awakening. “Sex is a great way to plug into your body or to find your body, but I don’t need that anymore,” she told Nikki. “I [no longer] have a body I would choose to sexualize, and I feel complete enough to let it go.”
What she did strive toward in those last few months was healing. She reunited with her estranged mother, Joan, who immediately flew from New York to be by her bedside. In her memoir, Molly wrote: “When she walked through the door, I wanted to climb right into her womb. The dynamic may never be perfect, but the past is the past, and we are moving forward in love.” Even as her body was shutting down, Molly’s mind was more lucid than ever—“elevating,” she told Nikki, connecting the dots from her past.
There must be meaning behind it all, she thought—getting cancer, then getting it again, leaving her husband to launch herself into a series of sexual dalliances with dozens of strangers. Sex, she ultimately realized, was a tool to piece together answers to core questions she’d always had. “What do I like? What is sexuality? Is it okay to want to be a sexual person even after being molested?” With every sexual interaction, she said on the podcast, she “filled in another puzzle piece of who I was sexually and spiritually and personality-wise.”
But what about love? Had she hoped to find it? When this all started, Molly told Nikki she was desperate to. But she later had a revelation: “The person I get the gift of falling in love with when I die is myself.”
On the podcast’s last episode, Nikki asked Molly how she felt about dying, now that it was so close. “This disease has taken away my ability to book travel, to make plans. I will buy tickets to things that I have to throw out. I’ll make dates I have to cancel. I can’t do anything,” Molly replied in a shallow, fluttering voice that sounded like it was coming from miles away. “And the other day, I was like, There’s a trip planned just for me, and I don’t know where it is or when it is or what it’s going to be like, but it’s all mine, and I’m really looking forward to it…. The honest answer about how I feel about dying is: I’m fucking excited.”
Just after midnight on March 8, 2019, Molly took that journey. As for Nikki? She fulfilled her promise to her friend and told her story to the world.
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