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Some people experience a gravitational pull toward partners who are irrational, unreliable, and too troubled to offer a loving relationship.
In this memoir, Butler, a highly gifted musician on track toward a successful classical career, seeks wild relationships with dangerous men. These mark a curious, apocalyptic period in her life, which also holds contrasting moments of calm and discipline, playing the oboe in music school. Butler chronicles her complex desire for forbidden pleasure and describes the way its consequencess leave her on the edge of an abyss—alone, with no support. The dissonance, so painful to bear, is described with courage in detailed revelations. We can sense the strenuous and dramatic struggle Butler experiences.
Yet there is something admirable in Butler’s striving for a balance in her life—searching out a feral element to resist the orderliness. And she seems to find courage and determination in herself to rise after a fall. But you wonder: When will this stormy cycle end? And in what way?
In response to Butler’s struggle, hope comes to mind in Leonard Cohen’s masterful song “Anthem.”
Perhaps Butler, like the rest of us, can best reconcile her sorrows with joys only by recognizing, as Cohen puts it, that “there is a crack in everything.”