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The butterfly lampshade a novel

"On the night her single mother is taken to a mental hospital after a psychotic episode, eight year-old Francie is staying with her babysitter, waiting to take the train to Los Angeles to go live with her aunt and uncle. There is a lovely lamp next to the couch on which she's sleeping, the...

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Main Author: Bender, Aimee (Author)
Format: Books Print Book
Language: English
Published: New York : Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, [2020]
Edition: First edition.
Subjects:
Memory > Fiction.
Mental illness > Fiction.
Mothers and daughters > Fiction.
Psychological fiction.
Summary: "On the night her single mother is taken to a mental hospital after a psychotic episode, eight year-old Francie is staying with her babysitter, waiting to take the train to Los Angeles to go live with her aunt and uncle. There is a lovely lamp next to the couch on which she's sleeping, the shade adorned with butterflies. When she wakes, Francie spies a dead butterfly, exactly matching the ones on the lamp, floating in a glass of water. She drinks it before the babysitter can see. Twenty years later, Francie is compelled to make sense of that moment, and two other incidents - her discovery of a desiccated beetle from a school paper, and a bouquet of dried roses from some curtains. Her recall is exact - she is sure these things happened. But despite her certainty, she wrestles with the hold these memories maintain over her, and what they say about her own place in the world. As Francie conjures her past, and reduces her engagement with the world to a bare minimum, she begins to question her relationship to reality. The scenes set in Francie's past glow with the intensity of childhood perception, how physical objects can take on an otherworldly power. The question for Francie is, what do these events signify? And does this power survive childhood? Told in the lush, lilting prose that led The San Francisco Chronicle to say Aimee Bender is "a writer who makes you grateful for the very existence of language," THE BUTTERFLY LAMPSHADE is a heartfelt and heartbreaking examination of the sometimes overwhelming power of the material world, and a broken love between mother and child"--
Physical Description: 283 pages ; 22 cm
ISBN: 9780385534871
0385534876
Author Notes: As a child, Aimee Bender enjoyed reading fairy tales, particularly the stories of Hans Christian Andersen. She began creating her own stories, and later, as an elementary school teacher, she enjoyed telling her students both traditional fairy tales and stories she had made up herself. Eventually, she began writing short stories, which have been published in a variety of magazines, including Granta, GQ, Story, and The Antioch Review. Her first book, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, a collection of her stories, was published in 1998.

Bender's work is intended for adults rather than children, but many of her short stories could be described as contemporary fairy tales. Bender's stories often include some of the same elements that she enjoyed encountering in fairy tales, such as of magic, fantasy, surprise, humor, and absurdity.

Although she has found success as a writer, Bender continues to teach because she enjoys the interaction with others and feels she needs that contact to balance the solitude that is required for her writing. In addition to teaching elementary school, she has taught in the UCLA Extension Writers' Program and in the writing program at the University of California at Irvine, where she received her M.F.A.

Bender lives in Los Angeles.

(Bowker Author Biography)

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