The Butterfly Lampshade: A Novel

Aimee Bender

Jul 2020 · Sold by Anchor

About this ebook

The first novel in ten years from the author of the beloved New York Times bestseller The Particular Sadness Of Lemon Cake, a luminous, poignant tale of a mother, a daughter, mental illness, and the fluctuating barrier between the mind and the world

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.

Ratings and reviews

The Butterfly Lampshade by Aimee Bender questions the nature of reality, the validity of reconstructed memory and the distortion caused by the filter of mental illness. As with The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, Aimee Bender provides a novel that is poetic and somewhat otherworldly as it straddles between the believably real and surreal. Francie is a young woman who is obsessed with remembering and reinterpreting a specific, traumatic period of her life. Twenty years prior, Francie was forced to leave home when her mother is placed in a mental facility. Forced to go live with relatives she barely knows, her journey marks a pivotal moment in her development. Now an adult, she creates a type of isolation chamber and reduces her activities to focus on minutely recalling each moment of her travels during that time. She recalls her mother’s increasing instability and descent into psychosis with the immature lens of a child. Francie struggles to comprehend the irrational words and actions of her primary caregiver, unsure if she can trust what she believes she experienced. Faced with a lack of safety and doubt, compulsions and obsessions take over Francie’s life and she attempts to compensate by painstakingly exploring their origins. With uncanny eidetic ability, Francie recalls thoughts and events that include the unbelievable animation of objects from pictures and other unexplained phenomena. The reader is left to wonder if these memories are projections of her mother’s illness, her own inherited emotional instability, or actual supernatural occurrences. It is a testament to Bender’s skill as a writer that all possibilities are equally plausible within the confines of the character and the plot. The Butterfly Lampshade addresses what it means to revisit formative time periods with a child-like mind: one that is open to magic without reservation or fear. Bender requires her readers bring this same mindset to bear in order to truly appreciate the virtues of her work. It is a peculiar book, delightful and original-rewarding to those willing to embrace its strangeness. Thanks to the author, Doubleday Books and NetGalley for an advance copy of this book in exchange for an unbiased review.

About the author

AIMEE BENDER is the author of the novels The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake--a New York Times bestseller--and An Invisible Sign of My Own, and of the collections The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, Willful Creatures, and The Color Master. Her works have been widely anthologized and have been translated into sixteen languages. She lives in Los Angeles.