Amy Butcher

I don't know why, but I always seem to have more to say about a book I didn't like than one I loved, and that is once again the case with Amy Butcher's Visiting Hours. Due to a variety of issues associated with the formatting of my digital copy, I had trouble physically reading the book, and by the time I managed to finish today, I was wondering why I bothered.

Other reviewers have commented on the self-indulgence of this memoir, which was prompted by the fairly insignificant fact that Butcher was a friend of Kevin Schaeffer's at Gettysburg College and was the last (she thought) person to see and talk with him before he suffered a psychotic break and stabbed Emily Silverstein to death in 2009. Butcher wasn't Kevin's best friend; she barely knew Emily; and she wasn't anywhere near the scene of the murder or its aftermath, so one might wonder how this connection produced a 274-page book, not about Kevin or Emily, but about Butcher. Indeed, Butcher anticipated this reaction and is quite defensive about it:

"I am aware - and always have been - that Emily's trauma is not my trauma.

. . .

'It's not like you were friends,' someone told me once in an attack I never refuted but will never forget. 'So it's scary, sure - that proximity - but you don't have a claim in all this sadness.'"

Although it feels like an unreasonably extreme reaction to me, I am willing to accept that Butcher suffered PTSD as a result of her connection, however tenuous, to Kevin's murder of Emily. Indeed, I think an exploration of this phenomenon - why some people emotionally identify with and interject themselves into tragic events which, to an objective observer, don't involve them - could make for a fascinating book. Wanting one's 15 seconds of fame may be part of it, although I don't think Butcher is "playing to the cameras" here; I witnessed this same tendency among my adolescent peers in the 1970s when one of our teenaged acquaintances was murdered and everyone was suddenly her "best friend." This, however, is not what Butcher has done. I suspect this book started as the letter to Kevin she writes at the end of the book - a letter which Kevin himself apparently considered a betrayal - and that is what it should have remained: a cathartic exercise best shared only with her therapist.

So why, then, have I given Visiting Hours two stars instead of one? Because Butcher writes relatively well. Her descriptions of places, such as "dusty riverbed trailer parks and one-lane bridges and gravel dead-end drives," are evocative, and she offers an occasional well-phrased (albeit not novel) observation, as in this description of how 22-year-olds think about death:

"I knew that sometimes, for no real reason, bad things happened to good people, but I also believed - in earnest - that these people would never be people I knew. I didn't understand yet, because I didn't know to, that lives could get interrupted, that in no way was an existence like a train lumbering along a track; a life could swerve or dislocate. An existence could stop or even crash."

Unfortunately, these moments are more than offset by statements which are either banal:

"Kevin frightens me, I think, not because of who he is or even what he's done but because of how similar we are, indeed how similar we all are, how the chain of events that led to Emily's death are events that could happen to any of us."

or outright absurd:

"But I think of the brain now and it's not that image I once imagined. I picture apartment buildings - poorly constructed and impossibly built. I picture homes stacked above other homes, people cooking omelets on broken burners, heaters plugged in and oscillating. Most days, the residents of these homes live peacefully among one another - they take showers, sing songs, and bake brownies - but one day, an oven's left on, or someone forgets to unplug the iron. Or maybe that's not it, either - maybe the people have nothing to do with it at all. But still come these chemical explosions, far too small and too complex to see, sending red and sparking embers into the drywall of our minds."

Towards the end of the book, Butcher appears to recognize the insubstantiality of her narrative and throws in a few random digressions on the science of memory, depression, and the "failure of our reentry, parole, and prison systems" - this last despite the fact that neither she nor Kevin has had any experience of parole or reentry. In her last-minute scramble for deeper meaning, Butcher is prepared to make astounding leaps of logic, as when she notes that men commit 95% of violent crimes in America; posits that this statistic is attributable to the "tremendous amount of shame" men feel but are not able to express in a socially acceptable way; and then concludes, "What is it about our nation that inspires our men to kill?" (emphasis mine). I'm sorry, but I'm going to need more evidence than Butcher's experience to agree that this is "the bigger concern" exposed by Kevin's actions on April 9, 2009.

I received a free copy of Visiting Hours from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.… (meer)

In this true story, the author's college friend, who is also a midwestern child with an idyllic childhood, spends an evening with her and later on goes to an ex-girlfriend's house and ends up murdering her.

Most of the book consists of author Amy relating the impact of Kevin's killing Emily on herself. Amy visits Kevin in prison and writes to him, making herself out to be a sort of self-sacrificing heroine, as all her other college friends have cut him off. "I wanted to shine a light into his life without stepping into what I knew was his daily darkness." Gee, thanks.

Other revelations come later - Kevin's mental illness, prior manifestations of it, Emily's attempts to save Kevin and herself.

Amy is eventually diagnosed with PTSD. The reader sympathizes, but the true untold stories are Kevin's and Emily's, and those of their families. Every parent's fear is that mental illness may reveal itself in their children as they are in their late teens and early twenties. What is it like for them when their fears come true?

No one wonders, too much, about how their friends deal with tragedy after it occurs - and certainly not as the center of a memoir. Nor did I, when I finished the book. Nor did a friend of Amy's, who said, in regards to her relationship with Emily, whom she didn't know well, "So it's scary, sure - that proximity - but you don't have a claim in all this sadness."

Amy's response: "As if sadness is an entity one seeks desperately to call one's own."

And yet, that is exactly what she does, and exactly why the book feels wrong.… (meer)