The moment my friend was diagnosed with terminal cancer, she left her husband and went on a wild sex adventure with over 100 men before she died
As best friends of almost 20 years, forty-somethings Nikki Boyer and Molly Kochan could tell each other anything.
So when Molly decided to end her marriage of 13 years and start dating again, Nikki heard every detail.
She heard about the luxury car mechanic who kissed Molly on the back seat of a client's vehicle, the German male model who turned out to have a foot fetish, the Ryan Reynolds lookalike…
So far, so usual. Good friends support each other, after all. What makes Molly's story so unique, however, is that she was terminally ill with cancer at the time.
Determined to satisfy a sexual desire she felt had never been fulfilled, she spent her last few years seeking out men for what she called 'sexcapades' – wild dating adventures to 'make her feel alive' in the face of her death.
Now her brutally honest and emotional story is told in a new comedy drama Dying For Sex, an eight-part FX series streaming on Disney+ and already garnering a hatful of five star reviews, starring Michelle Williams as Molly, with Jenny Slate (last seen in It Ends With Us) as her devoted friend Nikki.
Based loosely on Nikki and Molly's award-winning 2020 podcast of the same name, it's in turns funny, dark and deeply moving.
It's also seriously taboo-busting, with its frank exploration of the sexual needs of a woman with stage 4 breast cancer.
Best friends of almost 20 years, Nikki and Molly (right), who spent her last few years deliberately seeking out men for what she called 'sexcapades'
Jenny Slate as Nikki Boyer (left) and Michelle Williams as Molly Kochan in new comedy drama Dying For Sex, an eight-part series streaming on Disney+
Sadly, Molly died in March 2019 at the age of 45, but as she remarked in the podcast which was recorded in the months before, 'sex is about life… so it counters death in so many ways'.
'My sexual exploration was a way of saying: I'm not ready to die.' Producer and actress Nikki, who has starred in 90210 and Lie To Me (and who executive-produced the TV series), met Molly in 2000 at an LA acting class.
Although Molly ditched acting to focus on writing (editing an online magazine called Art and Skin), they forged a close bond.
Nikki helped Molly through her initial diagnosis in 2011 and the subsequent treatment – chemotherapy, radiotherapy, a bilateral mastectomy and reconstruction surgery on both her breasts. But in 2015, the cancer returned and attacked Molly's bones, liver and brain.
Though her husband of more than a decade (in the show he's called Steve) had looked after her during her first bout of cancer, a sexual and emotional distance had already grown between them. Ironically, they were in the middle of a couples therapy session in August 2015 when Molly received the call telling her the cancer was now terminal, yet instead of offering support, he remarked: 'Can we now get back to why I'm so angry?'
Molly decided then to end her marriage. What's more, she decided her sexuality would be reawakened. '[My body] needed to be touched,' she said on the podcast.
Initially, when she told Nikki she was leaving her marriage and embarking on a voyage of sexploration, 'I was so excited for her,' recalls Nikki. 'The idea of reclaiming your life and getting out of a relationship that isn't romantically working for you – I was so proud of her. But to do that during her cancer, I was enamoured by her bravery.'
Though Molly hadn't been told how long she had left, the two friends spoke candidly about the fact she was going to die – Molly even teasing Nikki she would return to haunt her.
Still, Nikki was concerned about how Molly would manage her illness during her adventures. 'I was nervous. She was pretty street-smart, but she was also putting herself in situations that could be dangerous – going to strangers' homes, being out late at night.'
Nikki, 49, who is married to musician Tommy Fields and was helping raise his two young children at the time, saw her maternal instincts kicking in on occasion. 'I just said, 'Use your gut and if you find yourself in any weird situations, text or call and I'll come and get you'.'
Molly moved into the guest room of the home she shared with her husband and starting 'having fun', as Nikki puts it, later explaining: 'I mean, it was like a full-time job.'
She's not kidding. Molly had dozens and dozens of sexual encounters, meeting them on dating apps, online and in every day life. After attempting to count all the men listed in Molly's phone one day, they gave up at 188.
A striking blonde with piercing blue eyes, it's little wonder men were lining up to date her, with some encounters lasting weeks while others were one-offs.
Before meeting, she didn't tell any of the men she had cancer. 'I think she didn't want anything to get in the way of the experience. She just wanted to feel like a healthy woman in these moments and it was a time to really compartmentalise and not have to think of the illness.'
And, far more strange, not once did any of the men ask what her surgical scars were, nor why she had a port in her arm – a device implanted under her skin to administer medications.
'None of them said to Molly, 'What is that? Is that a scar?' Nobody ever really noticed anything. I don't want this to come across as mean, but they were probably just thinking: I'm having sex with a woman! This is awesome!'
It's also true that when Molly sent naked selfies to some of the men, even as she recovered from further surgery and chemo, she cropped out anything that told of her illness, like tubes or packets of medication. It's not what many of us would choose to do – but for Molly it was a welcome distraction from her pain.
By March 2016, Molly had moved into her own apartment in LA and now, in a sense, made up for lost time. While Molly exudes sexual confidence in the podcast, according to Nikki, 'she didn't have a really explorative, fun sex life in her younger years like I did'.
As she recounts in the podcast, her first date was with a mechanic who worked on expensive luxury cars, and like teenagers, they ended up kissing on the back seat of one of his vehicles.
From then on, the assignations came thick and fast. There was the guy who enjoyed being tickled to orgasm, the 'insanely gorgeous' model who liked to suck on Molly's toes and the Ryan Reynolds lookalike who, very weirdly, liked her to kick him. It was, says Nikki, 'like each new experience made her more curious... What else could she try?'
How about an undertaker who also worked as a clown? Only in LA, you suspect. 'He was a Cirque du Soleil, steampunk kind of clown,' says Nikki, 'so by day he did that and by night, he was a mortician. They went on these great dates and he was exactly what she was looking for.'
Nikki saw up close 'how alive' the encounters made Molly feel, 'and how in the midst of her cancer treatment she would have these days where she had all this energy'.
'Molly was a phenomenon. There'd be moments of just pure exhaustion and she'd be completely knocked out for days on end and then she'd get this surge.'
Producer and actress Nikki (pictured today) co-hosted a podcast with Molly, frankly exploring the sexual needs of a woman with Stage 4 breast cancer
Ms Williams plays Molly, who died in March 2019 at the age of 45
The idea of collating her sexcapades into a podcast came when she revealed to Nikki over lunch one day that 'she'd already been on two dates that morning'.
But for all Molly's picaresque adventures, Nikki's earlier concerns for her friend's safety were justified when a man she called Joe – a 28-year-old she met on a dating app – forced himself on her violently. Her therapist later pointed out that she had been raped, and Molly admitted she 'disconnected here and there' during the traumatic episode.
'I desperately hate that she had to go through that,' says Nikki. Tellingly, she adds: 'It's also not surprising to me that she found a Joe because I think sometimes we find what we're working through.'
For while on the surface Molly's sexual odyssey appeared simply to be one final hurrah before the disease took her, the truth went far deeper: she was also trying to reclaim her body from the sexual abuse she had suffered as a child.
Molly's father Alex, a manager for bands such as REO Speedwagon, left her and her mother Joan when she was just three.
Years later, Molly and Joan were visiting the apartment of her mum's new boyfriend when he slipped a powder into Joan's drink, causing her to fall asleep.
In her memoir, Screw Cancer: Becoming Whole, written just before she died, Molly alleges he then molested her. When she told her mum, Joan sought legal advice but was warned not to take him to court as it would mean reliving the ordeal.
The abuse, Molly later realised, essentially caused her to 'split off into two different people' – 'I… became very afraid of the world and I became very afraid of getting re-molested.' As she grew older, she wrote in her memoir, it left her 'unable to be present during moments of intimacy'.
Also, as she tells Nikki in their podcast: 'I married a man who was very controlling because I thought he would protect me from getting abused.'
The terminal cancer diagnosis, however, brought with it clarity and a need to reassemble the pieces of her fractured life. For Molly, her journey became a sexual one, 'because that's the moment I became fragmented'.
As Nikki explains: 'I think she decided she didn't want to live in fear any more. I was so impressed by her drive to learn more about herself [right up until she died].' Admitted into hospital in late 2018 for the final time, she was still indefatigable.
She worked on her book, sent flirty texts to her continued stream of admirers and, incredibly, engaged in a tryst on her hospital bed with George, a 30-something model, while hooked up to an IV drip (thankfully, she was in a private room where the understanding hospital staff turned a blind eye).
Nikki and Joan were with her when she died. A little after midnight, having drifted off, Nikki felt 'what I thought was a nurse tapping my fingers to wake me up'. 'But no one was in the room. To this day I believe that Molly [somehow] tapped my fingers to wake me, even though her hand was nowhere near mine.'
Nikki placed one hand on her friend's head and the other on her heart, as Molly took her final breath. 'I told her that I was there and that I had her,' says Nikki. 'Her mum was resting at the time and it was exactly what Molly's fantasy was of dying – having her mum next to her and me right there with her.'
She says she constantly felt her friend's presence while filming the Dying For Sex TV series too.
'The guy that was driving me from my hotel to the set must have thought I was loony,' she laughs, 'because I was having conversations in the back of the car with Molly. I talked to her a lot and told her to let me know if there was anything that felt weird for her or inaccurate.'
And did Molly have any quibbles with the show? 'I kind of heard her in my ear saying, 'Well, that's not exactly right. I wouldn't have worn that shirt' and, 'I think we should have shot the scene like this'. I probably rolled my eyes and said, 'Really, Molly? When's the last time you made a TV show?' But more than anything, I felt so proud of her on set.' The show, which is as much a love letter to the women's friendship as it is to Molly's poignant last years, captures 'the energy, the intimacy, the closeness' of their relationship, says Nikki.
Today she admits there were times when she was shocked by her friend's exploits, and yet she could see how good it was for Molly. When she contacted several of Molly's former lovers to tell them she had died, they were devastated. George the young model called Molly 'magical', while the clown undertaker 'was torn apart' by her death.
She realises some may judge Molly's sexual odyssey harshly, 'and if all they can take away [from her story] is: woah, she was kind of promiscuous, then maybe it's not for them'. Molly, she adds, 'wasn't worried about what people were going to think of her, and I'm not worried either'.
Right till the end, Molly was piecing herself back together and she was determined never to stop living. 'She wasn't rolling over and saying, 'Well, I guess this is it'. I just love that she lived so beautifully and so hard, up until the day she passed away.'
- FX's Dying for Sex is available on Disney+ now.
