Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa Book

This book is so beautifully written. There are parts in this book that are achingly poetic and emotionally wrenching. González writes a memoir that has a certain precision which exposes painful memories and raw insights. I had to stop reading after the first chapter or two, immobilized by the physical violence. It felt like a "given," and perhaps somehow acceptable. I'm so glad that I picked up the book again and persevered. The physical and emotional violence is not accepted or acceptable. The energy of that aggression, first from family and then from lover, is ultimately transformed and reconciled but whoa, what a process. The last chapter is devastating.

I find it difficult to write this review now because this book affected me so deeply. The juxtaposition of beauty and pain occurred to me as a reader from reading this book, and this conflict and tension are similarly very much in the book itself. Where was the separation? There is no easy or ready reckoning. The mess and confusion are simply there. And after experiencing this, I am left somehow still pulled, tugged into some sort of state of longing. Longing for what? Longing for the way González makes the ugly palpable and the beautiful ecstatic.

Here are some of my favorite quotes:

"My head continues to spin so I drop down on my knees in a dramatic display of grief. And how silly my theater is, I conclude, because behind me the apartment is all windows and clear curtains, and fully of the faces of people who have never learned after all these years how to rush over to a person in distress in a noble attempt at rescue."

"As I nod off to sleep on this first afternoon on the road to Michoacan, I promise myself that I will try harder at communicating with my father the next day. Promises are so easy to make in a warm bus steadily approaching the falling night. My grandmother used to say that in order to remember a thought, she had to go to back the place where that thought was originally conceived because place triggers her memory. By dawn the bus will be in a different town -- a different state altogether, in fact. Tracing the promise back to its source will be impossible. My father and I are both headed forward, at the same speed for a change. Any yet, we continue to go our separate ways."

"Cuentame mas de tu padre," my lover will request in the young man's tongue. And the young man will comply because Spanish is his weakness and because the only muscles that can move in post-rapture are thought and pain and voice."

"The helplessness of adolescence was maddening. I began to wish that I were dead, released from this anxiety that kept me up at nights. Once, when an earthquake shook the rest of the household awake, I thought that my own rage caused it. Since I now slept in the living room, no longer willing to share a room with my father, I was acquiring these special gifts: the gift of become as still and breathless as the couch, the finding holes in the shadows that opened up into distant worlds, and the gift of breaking the earth apart with the destructive energy of my heavy thoughts."

"His fingers, rough as his kisses, press into my flesh with a fury that will leave traces behind. But I want him to remember my body this way. I want him to love me into escape. When he starts with the butterflies I'm thrown into a fierce ecstasy that tells me I'm with another man's body, in another history that unfolds itself apart from my past."

"Where was my father at the moment? I had no idea. If anyone were to ask me that now, I'd give the same answer: I have no idea. My father moved so far from me I wouldn't know where to look. But likewise, I have moved so far from him that I can never find my way back.

"How wonderful it must feel to love a father so much that when he passes by it's like the sweetest reminder that you are not lost, and that if you should ever find yourself in trouble, all you have to do is wave him over."