Dying for Sex
人生の最期にシたいコト
Storyline
The whole story, ending included.
Diagnosed with terminal cancer, Molly leaves a sexless marriage to find what she has never had, an orgasm with another person; kink, dominance and hospice in one register.
Molly Kochan lives in Brooklyn and is ten years into an unhappy marriage to Steve, a self-important journalist, when her doctor calls in the middle of a couples-therapy session: her breast cancer is back, stage four, in her bones, brain and liver. The hormone drug she is given raises her desire, and when she reaches for Steve he starts to cry. She tells Sonya, the hospital's palliative care social worker, that she has never had an orgasm with another person. She leaves Steve and moves in with her best friend, Nikki, an actor, who sets her own life aside to care for her.
What follows is funny and frank. Molly tries a dating app, a hotel room, a man in a lift, and backs out each time. Hearing the neighbour through the wall, she discovers that she likes giving orders. Sonya's ex teaches her to submit before she dominates, and kicking the neighbour at his request, she breaks her femur. Whenever intimacy comes close something freezes her, and the series is open about why: when she was seven, her mother's boyfriend sexually abused her. Her mother, Gail, a recovering addict, reappears. Nikki, worn out, breaks up with her boyfriend Noah and quarrels with Molly.
Molly tells the neighbour, a man the series never names, that she loves him at the moment her lung collapses. In hospital, once she can breathe without the tube, he spends a night in her room with the grudging leave of the night nurse, Ernie, and she has an orgasm with another person for the first time. As death comes closer she asks him to go, and he understands and leaves.
A spinal tap shows that the cancer has reached her spinal cord and brain. Molly refuses further treatment and moves into a hospice, where a nurse, Amy, explains to her how a body dies. She lets Gail help her at last, and Steve comes to say goodbye. Molly dies with Nikki and Gail beside her. Some time later Nikki is making theatre again and is back with Noah, and she catches sight of two old women laughing together about sex.
Starring
Michelle Williamsas Molly Kochan
A woman with stage four breast cancer who leaves her marriage to find out, at last, what she wants from sex.
Molly Kochan’s story
Molly is ten years into her marriage to Steve, and since her mother's boyfriend sexually abused her when she was seven, something in her freezes whenever anyone comes close. When the cancer comes back she walks out of the couples-therapy session and the marriage, and moves in with Nikki. She wants an orgasm with another person, and backs out of every attempt. Through the wall she finds her neighbour and the pleasure of giving orders; she breaks her femur kicking him, and tells him she loves him as her lung collapses. Once the breathing tube is out, he spends a night in her hospital room, and she has what she wanted. When the cancer spreads she stops treatment, lets her mother help her at last, asks the neighbour to go, and dies in the hospice with Nikki holding her hand.
Jenny Slateas Nikki Boyer
Molly's best friend, an actor, who takes her in and sets her own life aside to become her carer.
Nikki Boyer’s story
When Molly calls with the news, Nikki is overwhelmed. She takes Molly into her flat and becomes her carer; Steve hands her Molly's medical records, and she promptly loses them. When her boyfriend, Noah, switches off her phone after her dental surgery, she leaves him. On New Year's Eve she and Molly have a row, and Molly apologises. With Molly on a breathing tube, Nikki decides to have it removed for her comfort, knowing she may not breathe on her own. She does, and Nikki goes on helping her toward the orgasm she wants; Noah comes to the hospital with soup. Nikki holds Molly's hand as she dies. Later she is putting on a play of her own, back with Noah, and stops to watch two old women laughing about sex.
Rob Delaneyas Neighbor Guy
The neighbour Molly hears through the wall, who becomes her willing submissive and, in the end, the man she loves.
Jay Duplassas Steve
Molly's husband of ten years, a self-important journalist who turns her illness into a story about himself.
Sissy Spacekas Gail
Molly's mother, a recovering addict whose help Molly keeps refusing until the hospice.
Why it matters
Dying for Sex puts two subjects that are rarely allowed in the same room, a woman's pleasure and her death, into one hospital bed, and it treats neither as a joke or a lesson. It is drawn, loosely, from the podcast Molly Kochan made with her friend Nikki Boyer before she died in 2019, at forty-five. The questions it asks are plain: what it means to reach middle age without ever having had an orgasm with another person; how abuse in childhood can freeze an adult body decades later; why kink, with its spoken rules and explicit consent, might be the place where a frightened woman finally feels safe. Kim Rosenstock, one of its creators, has said that in making it they learned more about death than about sex, and that death may be the greater taboo. Underneath it all is a friendship in which caring for someone as she dies is its own long act of love.