What would you do if you found out you only had a few years left to live? Molly Kochan’s diagnosis of incurable breast cancer, at the age of 42, spurred her into leaving her safe but unfulfilling marriage and embarking on a frantic sexual odyssey.
Meeting her best friend, Nikki Boyer, for lunch one day in 2018, Kochan had already been on dates with two different men that morning and passionately kissed someone in a Dunkin’ Donuts. Kochan’s hilarious and shocking tales of casual hook-ups and kinky sex were a source of much laughter for the two friends. At one point Boyer joked they could make a great TV show called “Dying for Sex”.
Fast-forward seven years from that lunch and her idea has proved prophetic. Dying for Sex, an eight-part series based on Kochan’s quest to discover what actually turned her on before she died, starts next week on Disney+, starring Michelle Williams, 44, as Molly and Jenny Slate, 43, as Nikki.
The show is inspired by the friends’ hugely successful podcast of the same name, narrated by Boyer and comprising no-holds-barred conversations the pair recorded in the months before Kochan died in March 2019, aged 45.
Frank, funny and profound, it was an instant hit upon release in February 2020 and has since been downloaded over five million times. The memoir Molly wrote from her death bed, Screw Cancer: Becoming Whole was released that August, posthumously fulfilling her lifelong dream of becoming a published author. “The ripple effect has been amazing,” says Boyer, 49, a producer on the TV series, speaking to me over Zoom from her home near Palm Springs, California.
Kochan knew there was interest in her story — Hernan Lopez, then the CEO of Wondery, which is now Amazon’s podcast studio, personally gave their series the green light at her hospital bedside. But, Boyer says, “I don’t think she had a clue how profoundly it was going to land in the world. She would always say sex felt like the antithesis to death. Being physically on fire made her feel alive.”
The pair met in 2000 at an acting class in Los Angeles, where they both lived. Kochan was “a bit of a wallflower” from New York. “She didn’t like me very much because I was annoying and probably vying for everyone’s attention,” says Boyer, who grew up in St Louis, Missouri. Had their drama teacher not paired them up, she says, “I don’t know if Molly and I would have found each other’s friendship.”
As it was they became inseparable. Boyer was with Kochan when she met the man who would become her husband, a waiter at one of their favourite cafés. “They were great together for a while.” In the TV series he is called Steve, and is played by Jay Duplass. Boyer doesn’t use his real name. “I think he’s probably struggling with parts of the story that didn’t feel they matched up with what he had experienced. I care for him. I wish him so much love.”
• The GP said I was too young to have breast cancer at 36. He was wrong
The friends even shared the same doctor, who dismissed the lump Kochan found in her breast in 2005, telling her that, at 33, she was too young to have cancer. “My naive brain at the time [thought], he must know best, he’s a doctor,” Boyer says. Kochan, who started a blog once she found out her cancer was incurable, wrote of that appointment: “I was meek, I was afraid to assert myself and truthfully I probably didn’t want to know it was something.” By the time she was finally diagnosed in 2011 the cancer had spread to her lymph nodes.
Even before this, Kochan had told Boyer that she and her husband had sexual “difficulties” that she had hoped to address. But undergoing chemotherapy and radiation, a double mastectomy and breast reconstruction did not allow for “an active, exciting sex life”, Boyer says.
After the treatment, which left her infertile, Kochan thought the disease was behind her until she started suffering hip pain in 2015. She and her husband were at a couple’s therapy session that August when her doctor called to tell her the cancer had spread to her bones, brain and liver and was stage 4 — incurable.
Amid Kochan’s anger was defiance. “I am not ready to die,” she blogged. Instead she focused on how she wanted to live. Within six months she had left her husband “to seek joy”, she wrote, “[and] nurture self-expression that I couldn’t find in the context of my marriage”. Her decision “made sense”, Boyer says. “I was thrilled for her.”
As her hormone treatment unexpectedly made Kochan “horny all the time” and unable to sleep, she began her sexual adventures, taking selfies of herself in lingerie and sending them to men she met online as a way, she blogged, to “distract myself from pain or illness”.
Her in-the-flesh sexual experiences offered an even greater distraction. The first was with a twentysomething screenwriter. After their date in an LA bar, they were fooling around in the backseat of his car when, overexcited and panicked, he opened the door and climaxed on the immaculately manicured lawn outside. “Every time I drive by I’ll think, oh, that’s where he…” Boyer bursts into uncontrollable laughter.
The poor man’s predicament got worse, because at that moment “the car alarm starts going off”, she continues, describing the depiction of the unedifying incident in the TV series as “one of my favourite scenes”.
As Kochan grew in confidence she met more men interested in kinks and fetishes, largely condensed for the series in one character known as “neighbour guy”, played by Rob Delaney. They include the date who requested Kochan kick him in the testicles. Not a high heel fan, she bought stilettos especially, Boyer recalls, and then admits to the odd twinges of judgment. “She was just open. There was one guy that wanted to be in a cage in her house like a dog. [Molly said] ‘I’m so interested in learning why.’ I [said], ‘What the f***?’”
• I survived cancer, then had a double mastectomy
Going into strangers’ homes was “a risk she was willing to take”, Boyer says, and inevitably Kochan “got herself into situations that weren’t great”. Some dates lied about not being married — “Molly didn’t want any part of that” — and some could be “a little aggressive. She was learning in real time about her desires and her safety.”
Kochan’s gallows humour rang throughout, however. As she explained on the podcast, she wasn’t worried about letting strangers she met online come to her home. “What are [they] going to do to me? Kill me? I’m dying.”
Having enjoyed her own wild times in her twenties, Boyer — who is in a happy long-term relationship with the musician Tommy Fields, whose two daughters she helped raise — wasn’t jealous. But, she says, “I was having quiet sex in the bedroom so we didn’t wake up the kids. It was a far cry from what Molly was doing.”
Sex was also a way for Kochan to reclaim her body. She wrote in her memoir that, aged seven, she was abused by a boyfriend of her divorced mother, Joan (played by Sissy Spacek in the TV series), destroying her self-confidence and causing her to repress her sexuality. In marriage she had sought “a safe space” from that trauma, Boyer says, but instead felt increasingly confined.
“A lot of people think, ‘She’s just having sex, f***ing around to make herself feel good,’” Boyer says of her friend’s post-diagnosis escapades. “But it wasn’t just about that. There was healing of old wounds. Her whole life she felt fragmented and during sex she was allowed to make her own choices and put the pieces together for herself.”
Some of Kochan’s many liaisons — she and Boyer stopped counting at 183 — lasted for months. “She made people feel seen and cared for. It was about a lot more than the sex for Molly,” Boyer says. “Towards the end I think she was looking for love.”
And although she never found a man to sweep her off her feet, Kochan wrote: “I realise I did get to fall in love. I am in love. With me.”
After she was hospitalised in late 2018 and realised she wouldn’t be going home again, she called her mother, with whom her relationship “had always ebbed and flowed”, Boyer says. “They loved each other so much but sometimes needed space. Her mum didn’t leave her bedside. It was a beautiful healing process for them.”
At 11.30pm on March 8, 2019, Boyer was asleep on a chair next to her friend, her hand on Kochan’s leg, when she felt a tapping underneath her fingers. “I woke with just enough time for her last two breaths. I put my hand on her head and my other hand on her heart. I said, ‘I’m here, I’ve got you.’ I was in awe of her in that moment. It was one of the most magical things I’ve ever experienced. It was so intense and beautiful.”
Putting together the six-part podcast after her death “delayed some of my grief”, Boyer says, “because I was still working with her voice. I felt she was guiding me.” Kochan had bequeathed her computer and phone for reference, “which is the most vulnerable thing to do,” she says. “I saw every phase of Molly. I saw her sexy self. I saw her sick. I was scrolling hundreds of messages. I saw more dick pics than I ever thought possible.”
Boyer believes Kochan would have been thrilled with the casting of Williams, star of Brokeback Mountain and The Greatest Showman. “Hollywood legend, choosy about her projects, artistic, private. Molly would have been, ‘Yes, thank you.’”
The series is set in New York rather than Los Angeles, and producers took “liberties” with timelines and characters, Boyer says. “But it very much feels like me and Molly, the core of us. There’s a scene where the friends are in bed and Molly’s got her hand on Nikki’s boob and says, ‘It feels like a hot cup of tea.’ That’s true. They took funny, specific things and kept them.”
Crucially, Molly would have been delighted, she says. “I’m so proud of her. She was just living the life she wanted to live and it ended up being so much bigger than I could have imagined.”
Dying for Sex is on Disney+ from April 4
