The Butterfly Lampshade is about a young woman who questions her relationship with reality when her mother suffers a psychotic break. She recalls the moment her mother was brought to a long-term care facility with glittering clarity. Yet she questions the verisimilitude of three distinct objects of her memory: the roses set free from the curtains, a butterfly emerging from a lampshade, and a beetle from her school worksheet. Each consequential memory was formed during transitory events during the character's life. Bender is adept at weaving two realities together: France, the little girl, and Francie, the grown woman. We wonder, with Francie the grown woman, if Francie the young girl's memories can be trusted. The clarity she seeks eludes her the more clues she collects. Her mother's congenital psychiatric illness renders moments of specious epiphany obsolete.
The precariousness of life and mind are the only concrete artifacts the character finds in her internal search for answers. The character's relationship with her biological mother is fraught. Her mother, not always sound of mind, often isn't in any state to interact with her daughter or anyone. Her adoptive parents, protective, vigilante, watch for anyone signs of mental collapse. The character pedantically notes every small detail, because we are made to think, with the character, that her life depends on it. And perhaps it does—our identity depends on our memories, or ability to form new ones. The wild imagination and idiosyncratic perception of a child are vividly captured by Bender. Francie the adult lives a simple external life and a complicated internal one. Sides of which are turned over again and again, like the memories she scours for grains of truth and absoluteness.
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