Bandit: A Daughter'S Memoir

This is about whatever is cut from the frame of narrative. The fat remnants, broke bones, gristle, untender bits. Me, and Mom, and my sister, and him, the actual him beyond the Bandit version of him on the evening news.

The summer she turned thirteen, Molly Brodak’s father was arrested for robbing eleven banks. In time, the image she held of him would unravel further, as more and more unexpected facets of his personality came to light.

Bandit is her attempt to discover what, exactly, is left, when the most fundamental relationship of your life turns out to have been built on falsehoods. It is also a scrupulously honest account of learning how to trust again, and to rebuild the very idea of family from scratch.

Refusing to fence off the trickier sides of her father’s character, Brodak tries to find, through crystalline, spellbinding prose, a version of him that does not rely on the easy answers but allows him to be: an unknowable and incomprehensible whole – who is also her father.

Unforgettable, moving, and utterly relatable, Bandit is a story of the unpredictable complexity of family.