“Oh, great – another self-involved millennial has had a horrific life-changing experience and has to write a memoir to cope,” I started to find myself thinking as I began Amy Butcher’s memoir Visiting Hours: A Memoir of Friendship and Murder from Penguin Group’s Blue Rider Press.
In my age-ist response that I seem to have too much lately, I struggle with twenty-something’s struggling with harsh life experiences and writing memoirs immediately upon the end of said struggle…after all, I grew up with grandparents at dinner tables who themselves – and all their friends – had been alive during World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II, the Cold War, and so on. What can compare to D-Day invasions, held as prisoners of war, or other earth-shaking experiences, as bad as they might be? What do those young kids have to write about that the Greatest Generation, or the Vietnam Era generation of my parents, didn’t already do – without having to broadcast their achievements, all before they reach age 35?
This train of thought kept passing through my mind as I read, but her prose and depth of detail, control of the pacing of the story, and markings of time kept me going. Butcher has an ability to micro-focus on details such as bra straps, something that would not go unnoticed in a maximum security prison, but the rest of us take for granted.
About halfway through her story, I began to see that Butcher’s focus would include these marvelous details but would not be on the “isn’t it awful that I went to college with a guy who murdered a girl?” question. Rather, Butcher’s focus is on the fallout, the desperate aftermath of months and years of loss that followed her, as a bystander to the event, only hours separated her surviving with the “it could have been me” frame, with her girlfriend murdered, and her other friend, Kevin, the murderer.
She outlines the process whereby her friend, with all probability, lapsed into psychosis, after years of depression. The story then builds a parallel to an interesting process in her own development of PTSD without sounding immature; instead, it’s clear by halfway through the novel that Butcher has written the novel without asking for the reader’s sympathy, or as healing witness. Quite frankly, the narrative seems motivated simply to report: “this happened to me, and to my friends. I barely survived it, and my friends didn’t.” The narrative left me asking questions – about what is not known about depression, about medication, about therapeutic intervention.
At any age, all speakers of trauma narratives might be able to speak to their stories with the same focus, highlighting the energy – both psychological and physical – required to live each day with events that are otherwise impossible to bear. While Butcher may not intend this narrative to be categorized, it is certainly a fine example of a genre saturated with much more narcissistic versions than the offering Butcher makes here – her story seeks to find answers that provide satisfaction where there really can never be any.
annieden 