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Elusive Butterfly

© John McManamy

""My serial dream about her," she writes, "was always in heaven, on a couch of clouds."

I cast my mind back to earlier in the year when, as well as being the Depression editor here, I was also the Suite's managing editor of Mental Health. Every few days, a new application would arrive, almost always only partially completed and doomed to fail. Usually, the applicant would lose interest before submitting a writing sample. Other times, he or she would suggest a topic already spoken for. Other times still, the writing was substandard or lacked authority.

Sometimes, the applicant would cheat by submitting a plagiarized piece, but my hardened cynical radar had now learned to pick these up in a flash.

Still, I always clicked open my managing editor page in the hope that the next Sylvia Plath or Kay Jamison had just completed a finished application.

This particular new application did not have a promising beginning. The topic appeared too similar for comfort to one of our other topics. Then I read the sample article and knew we had to find a way to accommodate her. We slightly changed the orientation of her topic, and Amy Hillgren Peterson joined the Suite.

Being a managing editor has its rewards.

Now, I have the pleasure of reviewing her new book:

"I was sixteen," she writes. "She grew tired of my shit. I could see it in the skinny line of her lip, covered today with Mary Kay's summer mauve." It was a silly argument over which was the fuzzy fruit, peach or nectarine. Then mom's weak heart gave out on her, and minutes later the daughter heard someone in the hospital say, "this one's not going to make it."

Amy's novelized memoir is Elusive Butterfly (Babcock Publishing, Michigan), a metaphor for the empty space that opened up in her life when her mother was taken away. "I have two years," her father told her, "to turn you into a fully functioning adult." "I was stunned," Amy writes. "First I have no mom, and now I have to grow up and I have no idea how."

Amy also has to contend with bipolar: "I left a note and drove away from camp with that frontal lobe buzzing in my head," she writes. She is pulled over for speeding and given a $75.00 ticket. "After I pulled away, and the Highway Patrol car disappeared the other way I whooped a cheer for myself and hit the roof of the cab. I cruised at 80 and arrived home in record time."

Poring over old letters and using her imagination, Amy is able to bring her

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