Novelist Rene Denfeld drew on her homeless youth for 'The Butterfly Girl.'
,” trauma is everywhere. There’s Naomi, “The Child Finder” of Denfeld’s 2017 novel of the same name, a private investigator still trying to find her own missing sister. And there’s Celia, a 12-year-old living on the streets after escaping an abusive father.
“I think the book is actually really pushing back against this idea that people like myself are supposed to end up in the gutter, that we’re supposed to be these hopeless, damaged, broken people,” Denfeld says. “I’m very much of the mind-set that I think we need to acknowledge our trauma, we need to in some sense heal ourselves and heal each other.”In a recent phone interview during her book tour, Denfeld speaks more about the ways her story informed and helped uplift her third novel.
So Celia is a 12-year-old street girl. She’s living on the streets of Portland, Ore., because frankly, the streets are probably safer than her home, which is true for a lot of homeless children. She was very much inspired by my own history. I have a very difficult background myself, which I’m pretty open about now. I come from a family of a lot of poverty and abuse. The man I considered my father is actually a registered predatory sex offender.
But by the same token, that path isn’t something that comes easy for your characters. There’s a real push and pull as they decide how much to trust one another. Help seems as hard to accept as it is to offer. You’ve spoken in the past about fiction having to reckon with the way we depict violence and trauma. There’s no shortage of those experiences in this book, but still, it’s not traumatic to read. How do you walk that line?
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