A dying cancer patient having as much kinky sex as she can is the premise of FX’s Dying for Sex—and also based on a true story.
Michelle Williams plays Molly Kochan, who died in 2019 at the age of 45 from metastatic breast cancer. Kochan co-created the podcast Dying for Sex in 2020 with her best friend, Nikki Boyer, about how being diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer pushed her to change everything about her life. When she learned that her cancer was incurable, Kochan left her unhappy marriage and began a journey of sexual exploration.
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In the first episode of the FX series, a palliative care therapist asks Molly what she would put on her bucket list. They talk openly about their desires and Molly realizes she wants to prioritize sex and dating, and figure out what it means to really feel good. The first step is leaving her well-meaning but ineffectual husband (Jay Duplass) and the second is asking her best friend, Nikki (Jenny Slate), to be her primary caretaker, who agrees without hesitation.
Boyer, who in real life took care of Kochan until she died, talked to TIME about their friendship and what the show gets right—and wrong—about their story.
Why Molly was so horny
After surgeries and radiation treatments, Kochan started a hormone therapy that was supposed to squash her libido, but it ended up having the opposite effect. “I literally wanted to hump everything and everyone that I saw,” she said in one episode of the podcast.
In Dying for Sex, Williams’ Molly says her husband has not touched her for years, due to the trauma of her cancer. She shares with her therapist that she’s never had an orgasm with another person and is determined to have one before she dies. Boyer says that plot point was a creative liberty, but Kochan did talk on their podcast about falling out of sync sexually with her husband while undergoing treatment, and never getting back on the same page when her libido came back.
“For a long time with sex—and this is why I had a problem in my marriage—I was really, really, really good at figuring out what other people liked and then I could simulate that like an actor for them,” Kochan said on the podcast. “But I never really knew what I liked.”
What happened during Molly’s sexual adventure
When Molly decided to part ways with her husband, she started hooking up with men she met online. Molly even exchanged sexy pictures with them, including Snapchats. The men who like kinky sex on the show are composites, representing multiple men with fetishes that the real Molly encountered. While Molly did really date a guy who enjoyed being kicked in the dick, she did not break her femur doing that as the show depicts. However, she was a hit with men who want to be bossed around in the bedroom, and in the show, she can be seen barking orders to suitors—even literally, as one man liked to pretend that he was a dog.
Boyer says the real Molly did meet a man who wanted her to treat him like a pet dog and live in her home in a cage. (That’s why there’s an episode entitled “My Pet.”) The showrunners took this character and ran with it, imagining that a man dressed like a dog showed up to a chemotherapy session.
For someone who was dying, Molly described “feeling alive and creative” after her dates when discussing them on the podcast. While a man dressed like a dog didn’t really come to her hospital room, she did have sexual encounters in her hospital bed at the very end of her life. “She wanted to feel really alive and as normal as possible, so it just didn’t feel like she was stuck in the hospital for days on end,” Boyer says.
Boyer suggested they do a podcast after picking up Molly one morning from a 9 a.m. breakfast date, saying Molly had so many interesting stories that they should start recording them. (While the show mostly gets them right, Boyer notes one other creative liberty it took: in one scene, Slate’s Nikki loses her friend’s medical records. In real life, Boyer is much more meticulous, the kind of person who cleans when she’s nervous.)
Molly also held on to her sharp sense of humor until she died. As the show depicts, she really did ask a young doctor if he had a permission slip from his parents to be there, because he looked like a kid. In the podcast, she jokes that the appeal of dating a terminal cancer patient is that “if you’re commitment-phobic, I’m your girl.” When asked if she was afraid of inviting strangers into her home, she replies, “What are you going to do? Kill me? I’m dying!”
Controlling men in the bedroom was a way of feeling like she had some control at a time when her cancer was out of her control. Boyer says it was a way of “reclaiming her body.” “When Molly felt out of control, she did really, really fun stuff with men,” she says.
She hopes that the show will empower people to try new things sexually—”as long as it’s not harming anyone else”—and also to think about their own bucket lists. “[Molly] wanted to fall in love, and she did; she fell in love with herself,” she says. “So whatever is on your list of things to do before you die—you better get started.”