"The Butterfly Lampshade" Is a Tale of Childhood Touched by Mental Illness
Aimee Bender’s The Butterfly Lampshade begins with a heartrending telephone exchange between two sisters, one of them in the midst of a psychotic break while caring for her small child. The opening is spare and ambiguous, quickly accelerating into fear for a girl who has to lock her bedroom door against her mother on the other side.
The child is Francie, an 8-year-old possessed of extraordinary powers of perception and memory. She also has a knack for being on the spot when impossible things happen.
Twenty years pass, and Francie grows into a young woman lightly tethered to this world, always looking for “small things to hold on to, handrails to find” that will help her distinguish between hallucination and the magic she’s certain she has witnessed. She starts a business as a garage sale mud lark, finding other people’s castoffs, giving them a polish to point up their beauty, and reselling them. She knows how to reframe an object; maybe she can reframe her own story as well.
Bender has a gift for rooting wonderfully inventive fables in a very recognizable, walkable world. As in her 2010 novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, the middle-class Los Angeles of backyards and hatchbacks, bus stops and craft shops, is overlaid with mythic events—modest miracles, observed by few, that expose a world of mystery.
Bender has Francie impose a discipline on her efforts to make sense of what she’s seen. She verifies her memories with others when she can and builds herself a tent that functions as a sort of monastic prayer cell—a place designated exclusively for remembering. Her cousin jokingly asks her if, after all her meditative explorations, she’s going to run off to another dimension. “No,” Francie says, “I live here now.” It’s true, but her receptiveness to the marvels eddying around brightens every detail in a small, deeply felt life.
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