When Molly Kochan got the call that her breast cancer had returned as Stage IV in the summer of 2015, she didn’t write a traditional bucket list. She left her marriage, opened a dating app, and decided to figure out what she actually wanted before time ran out.
The Los Angeles-based writer and former aspiring actress was 42. She had already beaten breast cancer once, in 2011, after a doctor dismissed an early lump because she was “too young.” That first round of chemo, radiation, a double mastectomy, and reconstruction left her infertile but seemingly in the clear. Four years later, hip pain led to a biopsy. The results came while she was sitting in couples counseling with her husband of roughly 15 years: the cancer had spread to her bones, brain, and liver. It was terminal.
Hormone therapy, meant to keep things under control, had an unexpected side effect. “I literally wanted to hump everyone and everything that I saw,” Kochan later said. The marriage, already strained in the bedroom, no longer felt like the right place to spend whatever time she had left. In March 2016 she moved out, announcing the split on her blog with the simple headline “I left my husband today.” She and her ex remained close; she simply needed something different.
What followed was a deliberate, often chaotic, and deeply personal sexual odyssey. Kochan started with online chats and lingerie selfies, then moved to real-life encounters. By her own and her best friend Nikki Boyer’s count, she slept with somewhere between 183 and 200 men. The list included a Ryan Reynolds lookalike into masochism, a mortician who showed up in full clown makeup, a foot fetishist, a guy who wanted to be treated like a dog, and plenty of less theatrical but equally exploratory nights. She approached the risks with characteristic dark humor: “What are you going to do to me? Kill me? I’m dying.”
For Kochan, the sex wasn’t just recreation. It was a way to reclaim a body that had been medicalized, to process childhood trauma she had carried for decades, and to feel fully alive while she still could. “My sexual exploration was a way of saying, ‘I’m not ready to die,’” she explained. “I can live a life feeling like I gave it my all.”
She documented almost everything. First came the anonymous blog Everything Leads to This. Then, in 2018, after a particularly eventful morning that included two dates and a spontaneous kiss with a stranger in a Dunkin’ Donuts, she and Boyer decided to start recording their conversations. Those tapes became the foundation of the Wondery podcast Dying for Sex, released in early 2020 after Kochan’s death. The six-episode series mixed frank sex talk, cancer updates, and sharp observations about living without a safety net. It became a breakout hit, racked up millions of downloads, and took home Podcast of the Year at the 2021 Ambies.
Kochan spent her final months writing the memoir Screw Cancer: Becoming Whole from a hospital bed. Boyer stayed by her side until the end. She died just after midnight on March 8, 2019, at age 45.
The story didn’t stop there. In 2025, FX and Hulu turned it into an eight-episode limited series also called Dying for Sex, with Michelle Williams as Kochan and Jenny Slate as Boyer. The show, created by Liz Meriwether and Kim Rosenstock with Boyer as an executive producer, keeps the messy, funny, and devastating spirit of the real friendship and the choices Kochan made when the clock was running out.
Molly Kochan’s final chapter wasn’t about denial or spectacle. It was about refusing to shrink. Faced with a terminal diagnosis, she chose curiosity, pleasure, and honesty over the safer path — and left behind a story that still resonates.
