Molly’s husband, Steve (Jay Duplass), is portrayed as a somewhat clueless guy who doesn’t totally understand the journey that Molly is on after her diagnosis. In real life, Kochan and her husband really did part ways after she learned, in 2015, that her breast cancer was stage IV, having now spread to her brain, bones, and liver. (They were actually in couples’ therapy when Kochan recieved the news from her doctor.) They remained good friends, however.
“I was like, I love my husband, but we’re not really a romantic fit, and I don’t think that I can self-realize in the context of this marriage, for many reasons,” Kochan said on the podcast. It was then that she started to convert her virtual dalliances into real-life flings.
Did Molly have a real-life Nikki?
Yes. Molly’s best friend Nikki Boyer—who’s played to perfection by Jenny Slate in the FX series—really was by Nikki’s side throughout her ordeal. The two friends first met in an acting class in 1999. “We’ve been together through marriages, divorces, boyfriends, her step kids, and now my cancer…twice,” Kochan wrote in her 2020 memoir, Screw Cancer: Becoming Whole. “She cries, sometimes as much, if not more, than I do about my diagnosis. But we laugh, too. That’s always been the light of our relationship: laughter.” It was also Boyer who ultimately hosted the Dying for Sex podcast.
How did Molly’s actual story end?
Unfortunately, Molly’s real-life battle with cancer came to an end on March 8, 2019. In a blog post titled “I Have Died” that was published after her death, Molly wrote: “As I die, I still put pressure on myself. I get angry when I can’t sit up to type. There are projects I am hoping to finish before I go. But I have no control over any of that. The only thing I can work on is being without the guilt of not doing. Accepting that my days are what they were.”
