The wild true story behind Dying for Sex starring Michelle Williams

Get your tissues ready.The new FX on Hulu miniseries “Dying for Sex” is based on a heartbreaking true story about Molly Kochan, a woman with terminal cancer who decides to go on sexual escapades at the end of her life.The concept for the the show, which stars Michelle Williams, comes from the podcast “Dying for Sex,” which is narrated by Kochan’s best friend, Nikki Boyer, and features the pair’s titillating conversations about Kochan’s hookups.The six-episode podcast was released by Wondery in 2020 — one year after Kochan passed away from metastasized breast cancer in March 2019, at the age of 45.“I don’t think she had a clue how profoundly it was going to land in the world,” Boyer, who is an executive producer on the eight-episode series, said of Boyer’s story to The Times last month.“She would always say sex felt like the antithesis to death.Being physically on fire made her feel alive,” Boyer added.

Here is the true story of “Dying for Sex.”Kochan was a woman from Los Angeles who, at 41 years old, was diagnosed with Stage 4 terminal breast cancer in 2015.Faced with a grim health prognostic, Kochan — who previously beat cancer in 2011 — decided to leave her marriage of 15 years and embark on an adventure of sexual discovery.“Sexually, we had difficulties before cancer came along,” Kochan said of her marriage in one of the podcast episodes.“Right before I got diagnosed, I was kind of looking to recharge our sex life… and then cancer showed up.”After her diagnosis, Kochan was placed on new medication that increased her libido.

Her body “needed to be touched,” she said on the podcast, so she decided to leave her husband.“Sex, makes me feel alive — and it’s a great distraction from being sick,” Kochan shared.Boyer told The Times that Kochan was sexually abused by her divorced mother’s boyfriend as a child, so sex was Kochan’s way of reclaiming her power.“A lot of people think, ‘She’s just having se...