Memory, it must be said, is for shit. If you took me to the north side of Chicago, I could bring you to the restaurant where I first ate Indian-style curry as a kid. I don’t know the name of this restaurant, or the name of the street it’s on, or even have a clear picture in my mind of what it looks like; I just remember where it is. I can retrace my steps there from the Belmont El station more surely than I can recount my first kiss, occluded behind a mental wall of trauma. I remember barely anything of my high school graduation, where, according to my classmates, I famously refused to shake hands with the principal before taking my diploma and strutting offstage.
The interrogation of memory is one of my favorite themes in fiction. It’s part of what got me into reading science fiction, when, in my teens, I encountered Gene Wolfe and his narrators who have severe short term memory loss (Soldier of the Mist); who claim to remember everything that has ever happened to them in perfect detail, but whose memories grow conveniently fuzzy during potentially embarrassing scenes (The Book of the New Sun); or who simply don’t remember things happening right in front of their faces because they don’t fully understand the fantasy world they’ve been Neverending-Storied into (The Knight).
Another theme that’s been very present for me lately is the fact that, like many of you, I’ve been largely stuck indoors for the past 7 months with most social contact coming to me through a laptop screen.
Enter into this mix The Butterfly Lampshade, Aimee Bender’s first novel in a decade and the follow-up book to her incredible short story collection The Color Master (2013). Released this past July, it’s the book about memory and isolation that I didn’t know I needed, managing to be both intense and strangely relaxing, given the way it separates those issues from the external realities that we face day-to-day.
I went into Butterfly Lampshade knowing I was going to have feelings about it, if only because of the backhanded resonance I tend to find in Bender’s work. As a general rule, her protagonists are introspective women who view society (and reality) from a reflex angle, rendering the paranormal aspects of their experiences no less strange than the institutions and social mores we take for granted. Her male characters are timid, curious creatures who take shelter from the wild world inside their boring-but-undefined careers where they spend their days staring at ledgers and smiling stiffly in their business suits. Her fictional worlds come together in ways that neither endorse nor indict the status quo, but do place it in the reader’s hands in a way that remarks, Isn’t this peculiar?
This novel is in no way a departure from those themes, and readers who are simply looking for the new Aimee Bender book will definitely get what they’re hoping for. For those who need a bit more, read on.
The Butterfly Lampshade tells a story (if not, perhaps, The story) of Francie, a young, perpetually single woman who works in a framing shop in LA but would rather sell antiques on Etsy for a living. Her mother has been in a long-term care facility since Francie was 8. Every night, she has her neighbor lock her into her bedroom, and then unlock the door when he gets up for work the next morning. Throughout her childhood, she had 3 experiences in which images printed onto fabric or paper seemingly detached themselves and became 3-dimensional. Once it was a bundle of roses from a set of curtains; once, a beetle from a school worksheet; and once, the titular butterfly from a lampshade in her babysitter’s home.
These seemingly inconsequential events are almost the full extent of the book’s fantastical content. All of them occurred during transitional phases in her life, mostly related to her mother’s mental breakdown and subsequent committal into the institution where she still lives. In other words, times when a child’s imagination could be forgiven for running away from all the traumatic change she’s going through. But the roses, the beetle, and the butterfly don’t seem to be related to her processing that trauma, and she remains convinced that these things really happen. Now, when she finds her life in a kind of transition again as an adult, what is she to make of it all?
Her way of answering the question is as unconventional as the question itself: she constructs a tent on her balcony to serve as a kind of memory temple, where she spends hours each day isolating herself and diving as deeply into the past as she can reach.
The early chapters of the book can be disorienting. Before the reader gets a clear picture of the timeline of Francie’s life, the flashes between past and present in her narrative left me adrift in a kind of abstract story that is all happening at the same time. I can see where this might alienate some readers, but I also think that, if you’re up for the ride, this unhinged quality serves the narrative remarkably well. After all, it’s what trying to revisit your own past is often like: halting, random, out of order, refusing to produce neat conclusions.
Echoing Francie’s own journey, things come into better focus as the book progresses, but not always in a way that seems intent on seeking answers. Her relationships with her biological and adoptive family, her hometown in the Pacific Northwest and new home in Southern California, and ultimately her own life in general are more about clarity than solutions. And this is the element of the book that I found most relatable. Francie is not a character in search of redemption, or satisfaction, or really any kind of external goal, because sometimes being able to view your own experiences through a clearer lens is enough. Sometimes that’s what our fragile, unreliable human memories have to offer us.
Indeed, it’s often the best you can hope for. I think most people who have survived abuse, or addiction, or injustice on any other life-altering scale have had to learn this lesson at some point, but The Butterfly Lampshade manages to confront this difficult concept in ways much more elegant than what we are offered in real life. There’s no gratuitous trauma porn, no fridging, no convenient villain to oppose Francie in her dramatic goals. There’s just life in all its sloppy strangeness, and the impossibility of ever understanding the world in full and definitive ways. Sometimes (like 2020 for example), that’s enough to have to cope with on its own, before everything else that gets heaped on top of it. By the time July and this book rolled around, I needed a reminder of that as much as anyone. I’m thankful Aimee Bender was around to give me that reminder, and I think other lovers of literary fantasy will be as well.
M. Shaw is a multi-genre author from Arvada, Colorado. They are a graduate of the Clarion Workshop (2019), as well as one of three organizers of the Denver Mercury Poetry Slam, one of the longest-running slam events in the world. If you've met them in person, they miss you.
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