Contemporary Authors

• The Skin above My Knee ( memoir) Little, Brown (New York, NY), 2017

1. The skin above my knee : a memoir LCCN 2015960626 Type of material Book Personal name Butler, Marcia. Main title The skin above my knee : a memoir / Marcia Butler. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Little, Brown and Company, 2017. Description vii, 258 pages ; 25 cm ISBN 9780316392280 (hardcover) 0316392286 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER Not available Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

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  Marcia Butler’s life has been driven by creativity. She was a professional oboist for twenty-five years, until her retirement from music in 2008. During her musical career, she performed as a principal oboist and soloist on the most renowned of New York and international stages, with many high-profile musicians and orchestras – including pianist Andre Watts, composer and pianist Keith Jarrett and soprano Dawn Upshaw. She was hailed by the New York Times as “a first rate artist”.

  In 2002 Marcia changed careers and began her interior design firm, Marcia Butler Interior Design. She has served well over 100 clients. Her design work has been published in shelter magazines, and she is frequently quoted for advice on cutting edge trends in the design industry.

  Now as an author, her memoir The Skin Above My Knee, published by Little, Brown and Company, was released in February 2017 to national rave reviews. Personal essays have appeared in LitHub, Psychology Today Magazine, PANK Magazine, BioStories and others. Her first piece of flash fiction appears in an anthology of 100 authors from Centum Press. Marcia was a Writer in Residence for Aspen Words in 2015 under the auspices of the Catto Shaw Foundation. She lives in New York City and is at work on her next creative non-fiction book.

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• Psychology Today - https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/one-true-thing/201702/how-i-learned-stop-lying-marcia-butler

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  One True Thing
  How I Learned to Stop Lying, by Marcia Butler
  Author of new memoir tells the truth about lying to her therapist.
  Posted Feb 21, 2017
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  Contributed by Marcia Butler, author of The Skin Above my Knee: A Memoir

  Marcia Butler
  Source: Marcia Butler
  I read somewhere that people lie about twice a day and more often when they are on the phone. Lies are tricky little devils. They come in so many different colors and disguises. There’s the proverbial white lie, where you supposedly spare someone’s feelings. And the idiotic lie, such as lowering your golf score just because you can. You are the keeper of the scorecard, after all, so what’s the harm? But what about lying to your therapist?

  I’d like to believe that my commitment to face-to-face therapy and weekly sessions might have pushed the truth out of me; no phone, no husband, no job to distract me from what I was trying to unearth and uproot about myself. In fact, over many years I’ve banked copious hours sitting opposite various shrinks, composing a placid smile on my face just to insist, “everything’s fine, really.” Or sob all session long with, “nothing’s wrong, really.” Either way, I spent many years lying and paying a lot of money to do it. I began seeing therapists in the mid-70’s when I was just 19. It’s only recently that I’ve learned that one can tell the truth only when that particular road opens up.

  My first big lie began like a gunshot that rippled through my gut, but which I could not hear. I was studying the oboe in college and shortly into my second year something strange began to happen: I could not hold a steady tone while playing my instrument. The oscillation became so bad my oboe teacher convinced the school to pay for me to see a biofeedback specialist (popular back then) to discover the root of the problem. I liked the therapist’s eyes, kind and a little weary. So, I let him strap two sets of wires on me. One set indicated surface muscle tension — benign enough. The second was meant to identify a deeper underlying emotional discomfort — deadly.

  I remember the exact bookend questions:

  Q: What did you have for lunch?

  A: A salad.

  The needle remained dormant.

  Q: How are things with your father?

  A: Fine.

  The needle flew off the meter and disappeared.

  This lie was guileless and somewhat unconscious. Nonplussed by the silly needle I struggled to explain to the therapist what I could not mentally acknowledge, though apparently, my body was fully aware and on high alert. The truth about my father was buried deep inside a childhood of desperate collusion. Looking back, I was closed off — certainly masked — and much too young to articulate what I could barely admit to myself.

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  The therapist let it go, thank goodness. The biofeedback techniques worked quickly on the obvious belly problem and within a month I was back to playing the oboe well. That first lie, though, was a springboard for countless cover-ups, deceptions, and side-stepping that I used to fool many therapists throughout the next 40 years.

  Something told me to continue talk therapy with that older, wizened man for another year during college. I’d gotten myself a boyfriend who had a serious drinking problem and the shrink adequately shepherded me through those land mines. What I wasn’t telling him (and everyone else in my life) was that my boyfriend was spending several months in jail, and I was visiting him at Rikers Island every Saturday. My cover story was that he was in Europe with his family on an extended holiday. I kept the shrink up to date on all the cities he’d visited in Italy. Meanwhile, the guy was in the slammer just across the East river. This man was the first on a long list of bad boys I’d trot through my life, and I felt a crushing shame that I was actually involved with a man in jail. But complaining about his addiction to alcohol was all I could muster.

  The summer after finishing college, I engaged with a therapist at a clinic that took payment on a sliding scale. I remember presenting myself to her as simply needing guidance on navigating the ins and outs of starting my career as a freelance oboist in New York City. I was insecure, felt deficient and desired some bolstering. When I came in one week with the palms of my hands badly damaged and crusted with scabs, I explained that while walking in Central Park I’d simply tripped over an exposed tree root. Actually, I’d tried to kill myself by attempting to jump in front of a car, also known as a “failed dart out” in police jargon. I even embellished the foot fault, noting the time of day (noon) and the nice man walking his dog (golden retriever) who came to my assistance, offering his handkerchief to soak up the blood sluicing down my arms as I held my hands up in surrender. What a nice story — all lies. In retrospect, the idea of confessing to this suicide attempt, not to mention the suicidal ideation that had dogged me for most of my life, was not anywhere near possible. I watched myself talk, as if I were outside my body, and easily directed the therapist away from the scabs on my hands.

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  Enter my first husband whom I married in my early 20’s. He was about 25 years my senior. A father figure? Of course. But not in any way I was aware of back then. If I had possessed one drop of introspection I’d have easily seen that both my father and this husband wanted to control me and everything I held dear, including my body. My husband insisted I starve my 5’8” frame down to less than 105 pounds — almost an enforced anorexia. I was a dutiful daughter, I mean wife, and with the help of speed (better known as diet pills) and cocaine (considered non-addictive in those days), I managed to drop the weight in no time. My new therapist noticed this alarming weight loss and suggested I spend several minutes screaming while punching a few pillows (a popular release technique during the disco years), to help me fess up to my assumed eating disorder. It was easier to tell her I’d been suffering from a chronic stomach amoeba than disclose the endless hunger I’d been ordered to endure just to keep the peace with my husband.

  The lies, insignificant or catastrophic, continued throughout my adult life. All the while I’d forged a successful career as a professional musician. Yet I continued pushing my truths into the furthest recesses of my mind, which enabled me to compartmentalize and make room for my career. I held hard to the miracle of music — the only truthful sound I could tolerate for many years.

  When I reached my mid 50’s I began writing essays about my life, which eventually became a memoir. At first, I didn’t even question this act; I just wrote. I trusted that there was a story inside me, just like music, that was ready to be told. This process of inspecting my sad motivations and insane decisions stared back at me from the page. And every day, little by little, I circled around the “big subject” until I had it cornered, like a feral animal, in a small room. Then, I finally pressed the blackest of ink onto pure white paper and finally wrote the worst of words — the truth about my father who’d sexually abused me.

  Then I really needed a shrink — a total pro. This new doctor listened, stone-faced and rapt. He was much older, never laughed, and tacked strictly to the business of my life. Somehow his office felt like a safe holding vessel where I could finally let my taught rope slacken a bit. I couldn’t look him in the eyes, but I did begin to talk. His memory became the second repository for my tawdry inventory and he held it all close to his heart.

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  This act of telling the truth felt like attempting a swan dive off a Hawaiian cliff, but with no water below to catch my plunge. I was terrified and before too long buyer’s remorse set in. It was one thing to write essays; it was very different to actually say the words for someone to hear and then remember. I realized I still couldn’t tolerate even one person knowing what had happened to me — even my therapist. The shame was crippling.

  I requested Klonopin — about 100 pills would do — as I’d heard it was an effective sleep aid. He wrote out the scrip easily; I was telling him the truth so there was no reason for him to be suspicious. But I was not finished lying and sleeping was not one of my problems. My plan was to stockpile the pills and kill myself. After a few evenings of Googling appropriate dosage, I read that Bernie Madoff and his wife had tried to kill themselves with Klonopin and simply woke up a day later feeling well-rested.

  Chagrined and still alive, I gave in. Digging deeper with my therapist I finally understood that the lies over many years had been my friends. They’d actually kept me alive. The truth about myself and my father needed to remain a fact that was mine alone until the exact minute I could release it. Write it. Speak it. And not one second before.

  I’m so sorry, all you well-meaning therapists. All you good people who tried to figure out why a girl-oboist was sad and had a shaky belly; why she went back to the drunk for round two; why she arrived one day all bloody and scraped up; why she was much too skinny and began to disappear. And why she explained she just wanted a good night sleep when what she really wanted was the “big sleep." All of you who gently prodded and kindly poked at me, and those who cared a lot and maybe even loved me just a wee bit — it wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t even my fault. Because any hard truth cannot be understood and then told until such time when the words are, finally, well-formed in the mind and the heart. What is true rarely feels wonderful. There’s no picture book cathartic moment where you feel released and can finally “get on with your life." But this essential honesty is the only way I was able to look in the mirror and recognize myself: a woman who, finally, didn’t lie.

  MARCIA BUTLER was a professional oboist for 25 years, until her retirement from music in 2008. During her musical career, she performed as a principal oboist and soloist on the most renowned New York and international stages, and with many high-profile musicians and orchestras. In addition to her debut book, The Skin Above My Knee: A Memoir, her first piece of flash fiction will be included in an anthology of 100 authors from Centum Press. She lives in New York City, where she is working on her first novel.

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  Jennifer Haupt has written for O, The Oprah Magazine, Parents, The Rumpus and other publications. Her novel, In the Shadow of 10,000 Hills, will be published in April 2018.

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• Marcia Butler - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcia_Butler

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  Marcia Butler
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Marcia Butler (born January 5th, 1955) is an American writer[1][2]. She is the author of the nationally acclaimed memoir The Skin Above My Knee (2017). Prior to her writing career, she was a professional oboist in New York City for 28 years until her retirement in 2008 as well as an interior designer.[3]

  Contents [hide]
  1 Early life and education
  2 Music
  3 Interior Design
  4 Writing
  5 References
  Early life and education[edit]
  Butler grew up in Massachusetts and New York. Having begun her oboe training in junior high school, she attended Mannes School of Music on a full scholarship.[4]

  Music[edit]
  Since 1978, Butler performed as principal oboist and soloist on many New York and international stages, receiving acclaim from the New York Times as a "first-rate artist". She performed and recorded over 100 works by living composers, including dozens of New York and World Premiers.

  Her collaborators include pianist Andre Watts, composer and pianist Keith Jarrett and soprano Dawn Upshaw[5]. She was awarded a grant for solo recital at the Weill Recital Hall of Carnegie Hall by the League of Composers/International Society of Contemporary Music, and was the only American to be invited to perform Elliot Carter's Oboe Concerto[6]. She has served on the musical faculty of Columbia University.

  Interior Design[edit]
  Changing careers, Butler started her interior design firm in 2002, serving over a hundred private clients across New York City and New England. In the coming years, her design work was featured in various shelter magazines and web publications, including Design Bureau Magazine[7], Apartment Therapy’s The Kitchn[8], Gourmet Business Magazine[9], and Home & Textiles Today[10]. She received of the Design Excellence Award from the International Interior Design Association in 2005[11].

  Writing[edit]
  In 2014, Butler retired from design and transitioned into a writing career. Her debut memoir The Skin Above My Knee was published by Little, Brown and Company in 2017. One of The Washington Post's "37 Books We've Loved So Far in 2017,"[12] the memoir chronicles her difficult childhood with a distant mother and abusive father, musical education, and coming-of-age as a musician in New York City.[13] Earlier, she published essays on themes of abuse, trauma, relationships and music on Psychology Today,[14] Literary Hub,[15] Duct [16]and Pank Magazine[17]. Butler is also a breast cancer survivor and has written about her experience of illness and treatment.[18][19]

  Butler was the Writer-in-Residence through Aspen Words and the Catto Shaw Foundation in 2015.[20]

  Collaborating with artists and writers such as Nancy Zafris, Butler continues to write and speak about music[21], writing and creativity across the different disciplines[22]. She lives in New York City and is currently working on a book of fiction.

  References[edit]
  Jump up ^ Fisher, Karen (March 3, 2017), "The Musical Journey of Marcia Butler" Allegro. Retrieved July 19, 2017.
  Jump up ^ Colbert, Jade (Feb 24, 2017). "Mariana Enriquez’s Things We Lost in the Fire, Marcia Butler’s The Skin Above My Knee and Emily Robbins’s A Word for Love, reviewed." The Globe and Mail. Retrieved July 19, 2017.
  Jump up ^ About | Marcia Butler. Retrieved July 19, 2017.
  Jump up ^ Daum, Meghan (Feb 2, 2017). "Songs of Themselves. New York Times. Retrieved July 19, 2017."
  Jump up ^ Gillis, Tim (March 14, 2017). "Music Matters: Marcia Butler's Memoir The Skin Above My Knee at Print." The Portland Phoenix. Retrieved September 26, 2017.
  Jump up ^ Bulseco, Donna (March 20, 2017), "The Skin Above My Knee: A Memoir by Marcia Butler." Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine. Retrieved September 26, 2017.
  Jump up ^ Chou, Ann. "Fine-Tuning: How professional oboist turned interior designer Marcia Butler creates high-performance spaces". Design Bureau.
  Jump up ^ Bold, Cambria (June 10, 2013). "Kitchen Before & After: A Disorganized Kitchen Gets a Place for Everything". Apartment Therapy. Retrieved September 27, 2017.
  Jump up ^ White Karp, Jennifer (July 2013). "Saving Space in the Gourmet City Kitchen". Gourmet Business.
  Jump up ^ "I Can See Clearly Now". Home & Textiles Today. January 8, 2014.
  Jump up ^ News and Events | New York School of Interior Design. "Alumni Interview: Marcia Butler." Retrieved September 26, 2017.
  Jump up ^ "37 Books We've Loved So Far in 2017". Washington Post. June 8, 2017. Retrieved September 27, 2017.
  Jump up ^ Wigston, Nancy (March 5, 2017). "Music provided comfort, recounts oboist Marcia Butler" The Star. Retrieved July 19, 2017.
  Jump up ^ Butler, Marcia (Feb 21, 2017). "How I Learned to Stop Lying, by Marcia Butler." Psychology Today. Retrieved July 19, 2017.
  Jump up ^ Butler, Marcia (May 26, 2017). "I left the worst day of my life out of my memoir." Lithub. Retrieved July 19, 2017.
  Jump up ^ Butler, Marcia (Spring 2015). "Hacked by my mother". Ducts: A Pipeline of Personal Stories. 35.
  Jump up ^ Butle, Marci (July 13, 2017). "My Brilliant Blackout". PANK Magazine.
  Jump up ^ Butler, Marcia (Spring 2015). "Cancer Diva" (PDF). Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.
  Jump up ^ Butler, Marcia (Summer/Fall 2014). "Cells" (PDF). Cells. 4:2. Check date values in: |date= (help)
  Jump up ^ Fort, Patrick (Nov 26, 2015). "Marcia Butler on music, design and writing." Aspen Public Radio. Retrieved July 19, 2017.
  Jump up ^ Butler, Marcia (April 20, 2017). "Marcia's Met Opera Manifesto". Met Orchestra Musicians. Retrieved September 27, 2017.
  Jump up ^ "How a Novel is like an Orchestra: Nancy Zafris and Marcia Butler on Music, Math and Stories". Literary Hub. July 31, 2017.
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  WorldCat Identities VIAF: 24173019 LCCN: no93029235 CiNii: DA1436189X
  Categories: 1955 birthsLiving peopleAmerican writers
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• Pank Magazine - https://pankmagazine.com/2017/01/30/interview-on-mothers-daughters-and-the-corporeality-of-music-with-marcia-butler/

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  [INTERVIEW] ON MOTHERS, DAUGHTERS, AND THE CORPOREALITY OF MUSIC – WITH MARCIA BUTLER
  POSTED ON JANUARY 30, 2017
  INTERVIEW BY ILEANA FLORIAN

  —

  MARCIA BUTLER 1

  Marcia Butler’s memoir The Skin Above My Knee begins with a domestic, Sunday morning scene. The author, four years old, is listening to the soprano Kirsten Flagstad singing the aria Liebestod from Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde, while her mother is vacuuming the house with a thunderous Hoover. The writer’s two loves, music and her mother, thus make their entrance into the book.

  Butler’s memoir blends together stories about girlhood, sexual abuse, and an overwhelming passion for music. Against the gritty backdrop of New York City in the 1970s and 1980s, the author struggles with abusive relationships, drug addiction, and unsuccessful attempts to reach out to her family. Butler’s account of her life as a musician is no less realistic, ranging from nearly starving as a student to maintaining a grueling performing schedule. These experiences, however, are redeemed by galvanizing moments when performing in orchestras felt like being a part of a larger, living and thinking, organism.

  I spoke with Marcia Butler about creativity, competition between mothers and daughters, and the corporeality of music, in December 2016.

  —

  Florian: How did you start thinking about writing a memoir? MARCIA BUTLER 2

  Butler: Well, that’s an interesting question because I didn’t set out to write a memoir at all. I was writing about creativity, actually. I’d been a musician for about 25 years, and then was an interior designer for 15 years. As a designer, I began blogging and quickly realized that the more fertile subjects for me were the overarching principles of the universality of design, aesthetics and creative thrust. How all this binds us together as a society and how we live and enjoy life. What are we drawn to, and why?
  For example, I became fascinated with the power of three. It’s never two, it’s always three. This is born out in everything. In religion with the holy trinity, in myth with the third or evil eye. In the nursery rhyme – Three Blind Mice, in comedy and film – The Three Stooges. Through the masters in artwork, subjects are framed within a triangle formation to set up ideal proportions. Within physics, threes appear in sound waves and I’m sure on deeper levels as well, which I certainly don’t have the expertise to speak about. I could go on and on – there are so many examples in all cultures. But this always brought me back to music and a strange phenomenon in the fact that when two violins play together, they don’t sound very nice. But when you add a third violin, the beauty doesn’t increase by just one third; rather the resonance improves on an exponential level and with exceptional beauty.
  This reminded me of my performing days and thinking about peak moments on stage with specific, memorable concerts. I wondered what made them so wonderful. So, I began writing about my own performance experiences. This naturally led me to write essays about my life. For instance, my very first essay which begins the narrative section of my memoir, is about being four years old and hearing the music of Richard Wagner – his Liebestod from the opera Tristan and Isolde – for the first time. This is my very first memory of hearing music. Kirsten Flagstad was the singer and it was a startling moment for me and actually began one trajectory of my life. Even at four years old!

  Now to return to your question of how I came to write my memoir. I had amassed these pieces, woke up early one morning at about 5:00 a.m. and realized I was, in fact, writing a memoir. It wasn’t necessarily a happy sensation at all, but the epiphany kind of galvanized me and I managed to write it in about three years. I suppose, in retrospect, this moment was another one of those peak moments or a creative impulse that prompted me to continue and I’d eventually understand why.

  Kirsten Flagstad – Wagner Liebestod

  Florian: This early moment of understanding music is extremely powerful, both because of this passion for music that you’re discovering at an early age, but also because, in the book, your mother is present in the background at the moment you have this revelation. Your relationship with her, and with your family in general, forms a counterpoint to the story of your artistic career.
  Butler: My mother was an exceptionally talented person. She could draw figuratively very well. And she was just super intelligent. I mean, there were so many things about her that I found intriguing. I think that’s why I put her on a pedestal for so long. At work, she was a beloved schoolteacher and taught French, Latin and Spanish. She read voraciously; always had a book in her hand. She was a lively person on the outside but did not display that persona to us at home. I remember feeling baffled when I was young, and later on angry, because she’d present herself so differently when we were in public. She had so much interest and energy for others, but not for me. And it wounded me terribly.
  Part of the problem with my mother was that she was competitive with me. I see this only in retrospect many, many years later, of course. I believe that she felt, to a large degree, marginalized in her marriage and in her family life. Quite frankly, I don’t think she really wanted kids and could not reconcile where her life ended up. And she would not allow a closeness between herself and her daughter because I represented a barrier to her dreams. This competition was subtle and certainly not understood back then. At the end of the day the young girl, the young woman, the middle-aged woman wanted her mother, and I kept trying for years. I tried to be the best daughter I could be. And it was never the right way. Never. I was unimaginably sad.
  Florian: Did your parents ever divorce?
  Butler: They’re dead now, but they stayed married until the end. I believe that she was going to leave my father a couple of times through the years, but never did. I’m sure she felt she couldn’t make it on her own first emotionally, because underneath, of course, she felt incredibly deficient. That had to be the case. But financially too. She earned a schoolteacher’s salary, but you know how it was. Women of that generation didn’t feel empowered to take those steps. “He might be a creep, but he’s my creep.” That kind of thing.
  Florian: Your expectations were very different from the very beginning. You were trying to follow something for which you had passion and that was real and affirming for you, and you just allowed yourself to grow, in spite of lack of encouragement. I’m thinking of the years you spent at Mannes College of Music, and how you were trying to survive without much help from your family.
  Butler: One of the best days of my life was getting that call from the Mannes College of Music telling me I’d received a full scholarship, because otherwise I would have ended up at Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School. My internal trope was: “Just get to New York City. Just get into conservatory. I’ll make it work.” When times were tough and I had no money, I made it work in any way that I could. That meant I became a sneaky girl. For a period of time I ate only one head of lettuce a day. Gradually I lost my period because I wasn’t getting any protein at all; I was going into that state where young girls lose their estrogen. I felt a lot of shame as well, because I didn’t have the wherewithal that other students did; family support. As a result, I kept everything secret: eating only lettuce and all the rest of my considerable shenanigans. At the same time, I was around my fellow students who understood me on a musical level, and that was thrilling. When you’re 18 years old, that’s everything.
  Florian: This brings me to my question about your experiences as a woman and a musician. It’s not difficult to notice that there are, and traditionally have been, fewer women musicians in classical orchestras than men. What are your thoughts about that?
  Butler: In the first half of the 20th century, women had not been encouraged to seek careers in general, let alone one in the arts. That has changed a lot over the years. During 50s, to 60s, to 70s, and even into the 80’s, there were still very few women in orchestras. In any case, in the US it started to really change during the 1980’s with the advent of blind auditions, which are held behind screens. Vienna Philharmonic was the last holdout and accepted their first woman in 2003!
  Florian: Unbelievable.
  Butler: So true! But I’ve always been curious as to how the actual sound of an orchestra might be influenced by gender. I listen to a lot of really old recordings on YouTube of various orchestras from the 1940’s, 1950’s – and even older. These orchestras were made up entirely of men. There is no way to codify this notion, but I wonder how the sound of an orchestra has changed through the years with the inclusion of women. That’s not to say that women play in a ‘feminine’ way at all. In fact, if you close your eyes, it’s impossible to glean gender from someone’s playing. I just think there may be a subtle quality brought to play by a re-balance of testosterone and estrogen. Impossible to determine, I’m sure. But it’s along the lines of, what if women ruled the world. How would that change our planet.
  Fast forward: I just recently heard Berliner Philharmoniker and Royal Concertgebouw from Amsterdam, both at Carnegie Hall. The string section in the Concertgebouw is at least half women. Berlin has a large percentage of women now, as well.

  Berlin Philharmonic – 1950 – Richard Strauss, Don Quixote

  Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra – 2010 – Gustav Mahler, 6th Symphony

  Florian: Your book talks a lot about music as an embodied, physical act. You mention a conductor who can communicate in a nonverbal way with the orchestra and a conductor who had to tell the orchestra what to do. I also remember reading about you standing up, taking the correct breath, and then playing the oboe… Tell us a little bit more about that.
  Butler: Playing any instrument, whether it’s an oboe, or a flute, or a tuba, is tremendously physical. It may look like we’re just sitting there blowing, but there’s a great deal of focused physical energy that goes into playing an instrument. It’s hard to imagine: you must blow to produce the sound, but also create an extraordinarily beautiful sound, and further, interpret highly complex music. Then you must sustain it over a long period of time – usually more than an hour. Imagine being an Olympic hurdler who must jump for an hour non-stop. The stamina is colossal, exactly like an Olympic athlete, and that’s not an exaggeration. It’s such a rarefied channeling of human energy.
  But that’s just the physical part. When you put a group of people together there is a synergy that needs to happen which occurs on the intuitive level. You’re listening and looking and getting cues from those obvious senses. But there’s also the attuned knowing amongst the group. Another way of putting it is this: the top mental process is when you’re fully aware of what’s going on, but then there’s the underbelly, where you unconsciously understand what the unspoken impulses are; the things outside of and below those obvious senses. When you make music, you fuse the combined energies of the group: physical, mental, emotional and intuitive – all creating something artistic, simultaneously.
  This is something that musicians learn to do, but it’s also a gift. If you are talented and have the right training and the right ears, and if your intuition is exceptional then all these extraordinary abilities will float to the top. But music must be at the helm. The question is rhetorical but always present: Why are we sitting here playing? It’s because there’s an opportunity at every moment to communicate something to the listener and for that person to be moved. That’s the raw experience. It’s an act of love actually.
  I’ve attempted to explain this complex phenomenon in my book through describing my performances. Music is truly a miracle. And it is why, in my opinion, music is an art form that all people relate to and want to be close to. You want to be on stage with the Grateful Dead; you want to be in the front row at a Billy Joel concert; you want to be enveloped by the sound of an orchestra. In all cases, the universal desire is to be in touch with that exact moment when the good stuff is happening on stage. That’s what musicians do. And the listener can experience it too. So, there are always two points in music: the person making the music and the person hearing it. Then the connection is fully embodied.

  Florian: Speaking of sound, and person, and embodiment. There is another theme that reappears through your book… making reeds for your oboe, a practice that you engaged in every day. It made me wonder, because you talked about having your own sound. How was your sound related to the reeds? And what are those mysterious reeds, really?
  Butler: Right, those evil, evil little devils (laughs). First, for oboe players or for any instrumentalists, sound is like DNA. It’s a thumbprint. Now, for me it began with Kirsten Flagstad’s voice when I was four years old. That was a template of sorts for how I heard an artistic utterance.
  Florian: Were you hoping your oboe would sound like Flagstad’s voice?
  Butler: Well, it wasn’t even that specified. I was a young oboist who, at four years old, heard her first music produced in a certain way.
  Florian: Maybe in terms of emotion?
  Butler: Yes, but I wasn’t conscious of it when I first heard her voice, or even when I started playing the oboe, but her sound was my tattoo. So, when you’re making the reed, you’re fashioning it in a way that will give you your sound.

  Marcia Butler – oboist – Keith Jarrett, Adagio for oboe and orchestra

  But reed making remains yeoman’s work for the oboist. Basically, you’re making reeds every day. Constantly. They wear out because you’re playing them all the time. I would have 20 reeds in a box at any time and I understood which ones I would play for which music. The acoustic of the hall made a difference too. Alice Tully Hall vs Carnegie Hall. So, it’s all about the reed. If you don’t have a good reed you’re up the creek. It’s a high wire act and very annoying! Occasionally I’d have a bad reed for a concert. Perhaps it wasn’t speaking in a certain way, or wasn’t producing my sound. It felt just awful. But you must be a good enough player and artist to actually manage that bad reed and play beautifully in spite of it.
  Florian: Against the reed, basically.
  Butler: Yes, exactly. I sometimes hear people playing at places like the MET Opera Orchestra and they say, “Oh my reed was terrible,” and they sounded great to me. So that’s the testament, they played beautifully in spite of a bad reed. It’s always this balance of trying to make a reed that’s going to do everything for you. Yet, at the end of the day, you have to do it for the reed. It’s weird, you just can’t imagine it.
  Florian: I want a picture of the ideal reed.
  Butler: The picture means nothing (laughs). But are you feeling my pain?
  Florian: Yes, I am.
  Butler: Imagine it this way: if a violinist had to make a bow every day in order to play, and the bow hair was crappy, and the wood is awful… that’s what we oboists are dealing with. Plus, as soon as you make the reed, it begins to die. The reed is made of bamboo, which was a living organic thing. Because you are blowing into it, your saliva, which has enzymes that helps destroy the food you eat, is also destroying the reed too! Eventually the reed will just die – the vibrancy is gone because your saliva has killed it. You can’t resurrect something that enzymes have literally eaten away. The little soldier is gone.
  Florian: And, as you said earlier, you’re only as good as your last performance. I’m curious about your experience as a freelancer. How did it feel to be a freelance classical musician in New York City in the 1980s?
  Butler: I came into freelancing after college, in the 80s, 90s and the 2000s. I retired in 2008. Back then, there were many orchestras in New York City and the surrounding areas that had concert series of four to eight performances a year. I held positions in many of these orchestras. We had a robust performing community. One of the unique things about freelancing is that I played with a wide variety of fantastic players. The personnel of these orchestras were always changing. Say you’d have three concerts in one week – four rehearsals for each concert. One job is a certain group of musicians, the other job is another group of musicians, and you know them and their playing very well. This requires flexibility and is extremely interesting on a musical level. And I did make a good living – always paid my bills.
  Florian: How about your current projects? You mentioned that you’re writing a novel. What is it about?
  Butler: Yes, this is a work in progress. It is set in New York City about a man named Pickle, and features the George Washington Bridge.
  Florian: It seems that you’re fascinated with New York City.
  Butler: This city has a heart and soul like no other. I’ve lived here since 1973 and I adore every nook and cranny of New York City. The culture is so diverse and somehow every single last person makes an impact. Goethe said music is liquid architecture and architecture is frozen music. All I need to do is look up and there’s the skyline – the buildings – making their own music. I turn the corner, and there’s another symphony for my eyes. It’s a great place to live.

  —

  Marcia Butler was a professional oboist in New York City for over 25 years. In 2002 she formed her interior design firm, Marcia Butler Interior Design. Now as a writer, her memoir, The Skin Above My Knee (Little, Brown) will be published February 21, 2017. She is currently at work on a novel.
  Ileana Florian is a Romanian American author. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Mulberry Fork Review, and edited collections. She is the essays editor of ducts.org and is currently at work on a nonfiction book about growing up in socialist Romania.

  This entry was posted in Interviews and tagged MARCIA BUTLER, memoir, MOTHERS, music, OBOE, THE SKIN ABOVE MY KNEE, WOMEN. Bookmark the permalink.

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  MARCIA BUTLER

  I was a professional oboist in New York City for almost 30 years. In 2002 I started what became a successful interior design firm: Marcia Butler Interior Design. In 2017 my memoir, The Skin Above My Knee was published by Little, Brown and Company. I've since closed the design firm and am writing full time.

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  MarciaMarcia spent a month in Aspen as a 2015 Writer in Residence where she worked on her novel. At a standing-room-only reading at the Woody Creek Community Center, she read from her forthcoming memoir The Skin Above My Knee. She also participated in Richard Russo’s fiction workshop at Summer Words 2015.

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  Marcia Butler’s life has been driven by creativity. For 25 years she performed throughout the world as a professional oboist. She was hailed by the New York Times as “a first rate artist” and performed and recorded with such luminaries as pianist Andre Watts, soprano Dawn Upshaw and jazz great Keith Jarrett. In 2002 Marcia switched careers and began her interior design firm, Marcia Butler Interior Design. She has served well over 100 clients in twelve years and her design work has been published in shelter magazines. Now as an author, her memoir The Skin Above My Knee was recently sold to Little, Brown and Company, with a release date of January 2017. She has published numerous personal essays in journals and online literary sites and is currently working on a novel. Marcia lives in New York City.

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  About
  Marcia Butler is an award-winning interior designer and founder of Marcia Butler Interior Design Inc in New York City.

  Marcia sees interior design as an expression of the self and has been helping her clients define their own unique style for over ten years in over one hundred projects. As a former internationally renowned oboist praised by The New York Times as a “first rate artist,” Marcia’s work is particularly inspired by music and its commonality with the elements of design. Her creative palette is derived from the sights, sounds, and sensations around her; in turn, she brings elements of color, function, beauty, livability, and the unexpected to every project.

  Marcia’s talent as a designer paired with her precision as a project manager continually inspires confidence in her clients. She has an extensive knowledge of all design styles and is able to work seamlessly with her clients to achieve their desired aesthetic. Through discussion and exploration of the design process, she helps them to refine an expression of themselves, translated into their home or workplace. Her wide range of projects and diverse roster of satisfied clients reflect the success of this approach.

  Marcia graduated from the New York School of Interior Design with highest distinction. She is the recipient of a Design Excellence Award from the International Interior Design Association and has been featured in Design Bureau Magazine, on Apartment Therapy’s The Kitchn, and in Gourmet Business Magazine.

  © 2017 Marcia Butler Interior Design Inc

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  Conversation with Marcia Butler
  29.03.2017 - Pressenza New York

  This post is also available in: Spanish

  Conversation with Marcia Butler
  By Jhon Sánchez

  Marcia Butler’s book came to me like a miracle. I was editing a short story that elicits around the topic of music when ‘The Skin Above My Knee’ plopped into my mailbox. It surprised me that Marcia was a well-regarded oboist before becoming a writer. Her memoir uncovers simultaneously her life as well as her passion for music. It was a delight to read. I felt like she was a musical conductor directing the flow of my short story. I wanted to talk to Marcia about her book with the hope of being impregnated with her beautiful tone. Thanks Marcia for granting this interview here in NYC.

  Marcia, tell us how the idea for this memoir came to you?

  I hadn’t intended to write a memoir; rather, I was interested in writing essays about creativity. Those pieces eventually led me to write about my own experiences while performing as an oboist, which involved explaining the intense creative process that evolves during the act of playing music. Then the personal stories seemed to naturally seep into the mix – and voila! I realized I was, in some way, writing about myself the whole time.
  What’s the story behind the title. More than one person has told me “What a beautiful title.”

  The title is, finally, gently referenced toward the end of the book. Throughout my memoir, the reader gleans over and over that my mother was profoundly distancing. During a rehearsal for a concert, I emotionally collapsed when I realized that this area at my knee was the only manifestation of connection I could summon with regard to my mother. Just a patch of skin. And of course, this was a fantasy, but a very painful realization all the same. All this was brought to the surface during the rehearsal when Judy Collins sang the Leonard Cohen song Suzanne.
  I love the opening because we enter an intimate moment in the life of a musician, but once I finished the book I thought, ‘Any chapter could have been an opening chapter.’ Do you think this is the kind of book one could start reading from any chapter? Among them all, each one so complete, how did you know the opening chapter was the one?

  Most chapters could be standalone essays; certainly the music chapters and many others that tell my personal narrative. So theoretically one could dive in anywhere and still feel grounded in the material. This first chapter worked for me because it establishes the author in objective reality and as an expert at her job. The reader knows from the very beginning that this oboist is at the top of her field and is, therefore, completely reliable. At the same time, the chapter delves into the intricacy of the art form and the ephemeral nature of making music. We know where she will end up professionally, but the reader is, hopefully, intrigued as to what might happen to her on a personal level. The first chapter gathers together small teasers of what is to come throughout the memoir.
  This was my subway book. I could read certain chapters between stops without having to close the book. How did you accomplish that? I love that brevity.

  That came naturally, especially with the short, second person POV music chapters. Since this was the first major writing I’d ever attempted, I believe that short chapters suited my style. And I tend to be a “to the point” person by nature, so I suppose that is reflected organically on the page.
  The book is divided between your personal life and your life as a musician. You write about music in a casual tone, intimate and beautiful. Do you have any advice on writing in such a manner?

  Again – this pivoting device came to me intuitively. And as I looked back after writing the book, I realized that I was unconsciously attempting to further delineate the fact that I was leading two lives in real time. I don’t suggest any sort of construct or conceit to writers, but encourage them to allow the process of writing to finally tell them how the book wants to be laid out. That may sound “woo-woo”, but I do believe that the book takes the reins in a large way. The writer must know when to trust and when to steer.
  As I was reading your memoir, realizing your life had been full of difficulties, from drug abuse to complicated family relations, I asked myself, what was the moment that allowed you to write about it with such tenderness.

  For such realizations, there is no “aha” moment, but rather a slow burn. I’ve learned through the years, and sometimes with great difficulty, that compassion is necessary to fully understand not only others but also oneself. Everyone has deep hardships. But in memoir writing, anger and frustration is not a useful emotion from which to relay circumstances. It causes the reader to not trust the author who may have some axe to grind or feels the need to take the inventory of others. So I looked at my own life and saw how many mistakes I made; how I may have been unkind; how I surely could have been a better person. Writing it all down helped me to forgive myself. And others.
  You managed to succeed as a musician even though you didn’t come from a family of musicians, or a wealthy family, and survived abuse and so on. Do you think this is a story of emotional alchemy? Is this intended to be a story for young musicians trying to accomplish their dreams?

  Oh, I would love for young musicians to read my story and relate to the creative imperatives that drive an artist. Because when I was young, there was nothing else in the world I could even consider as a life path other than music. Few feel this. And even fewer actually attempt it and then succeed. That is not to say that I see myself as particularly special – it’s just that I have always felt that I was not fully in control of my artistic destiny, even when working incredibly hard at it. Surely young people might appreciate this and also might gain some inspiration to follow the gifts they have been given. So yes, my story is fundamentally about transformation, in music and in life.
  You have an interesting life. What would your advice be for writers who don’t seem to have the same depth of experience?

  My life has been varied in occupations – from musician, to interior designer, and now to writer. But I hasten to say that emotional depth is not outwardly manifested in a public way for most people. And this fact is something I encourage all writers to hold onto. Pain is pain. Struggle is struggle. Confusion is confusion. Love is love. Hate is hate. Desire is desire. And, finally, a story is a story. How the writer transforms these human experiences onto the page is not predicated by an outward, visible life. All you need is a heart, an imagination, a good vocabulary and some decent craft dials. And discipline helps a lot too!
  How different do you think your story would be if you were a man?

  This is such an interesting question! I’d like to say no difference at all, but that is a fantasy because of how society and families understand, interpret and deal with gender. The experiences of men and women are different due to societal constructs, both reasonable and terrible. What is inside us all as human beings, male or female, are universal human truths. That very fact is why I feel there may be hope in the world. Mental constructs and beliefs cannot change the essence of this truth. The topic is vast and would be a fertile conversation face to face.
  I underlined many beautiful quotes in the book, but I would like to call attention to this one, “You still must conquer technical aspects, but that technique is now truly in service to the voice of the composer. The hierarchy has reversed, and the process is properly aligned. The music eventually shows you the way and becomes the solution. You feel like you’ve come back from the dead.” Would you say writing is similar to this description and/or how would it differ?

  I believe one could apply this quote to writing (and all art forms for that matter), because there is always that moment of alchemy, when inherent difficulty transforms into the wonder of change and also a strange “knowing”. Somehow the hard rub of not getting the thing (whether music or writing) to behave like you want it to behave, falls into the background and stops being some awful and intolerable noise. Rather, it is now a distant rumble. And soon you can forget that it was even in your ears! This is true for the musician and the writer. The musician experiences this in endless practicing. For a writer, it is the entrenched editing process. When the cogs lock into place, there is great relief and pure joy.
  Finally, I finished the book precisely as the 2 train opened its doors on 72nd street. Part of the story, especially the end, takes place around 74th street on the east side. It was another miracle. So please give me a hug.

  More information about the Marcia Butler and her work

  The book is available in Amazon

  Jhon Sanchez: A native of Colombia, Mr. Sanchez immigrated to the United States seeking political asylum. He received a law degree from I.U. and an MFA from LIU. Currently, Mr. Sanchez is an attorney and enjoys traveling and cooking in his spare time. His publications in 2017 are “The Vinegar Scent of Books,” available in Swamp Ape Review and “Acacia and the Thief of Names,” available in Existere. He is also contributor to “Letting Go: An Anthology of Attempts”, listed by BuzzFeed as one of the best anthologies of 2016, Nominated for The Best of the Net Anthology 2016 and for a Pushcart Prize in 2015 and 2016. He was awarded the Newnan Art Rez Program for summer of 2017.

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  Loren Kleinman, Contributor
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  Marcia Butler on Memoir and the Skin Above Her Knee
  09/24/2016 01:48 pm ET

  Marcia Butler, Author, The Skin Above My Knee
  130
  Marcia Butler was a professional oboist for 25 years, until her retirement from music in 2008. During her musical career, she performed as a principal oboist and soloist on the most renowned New York and international stages, and with many high-profile musicians and orchestras. As an author, Marcia sold her memoir, The Skin Above My Knee to Little, Brown and Company, to be released in February 2017. She has published personal essays in numerous publications and is currently working on a novel. She resides in New York City.

  Loren Kleinman (LK): What made you want to write a memoir, and was there a particular moment in your life that led you to write The Skin above My Knee?

  Marcia Butler (MB): I began writing about six years ago for my interior design blog. My blogs quickly expanded from the obvious topics for that field. I found that I was more interested in exploring aspects of creativity; and because I’d been a professional oboist for many years before becoming a designer, the fluidity of expressing art though different disciplines or vehicles intrigued me. For some reason I’d been able to make this shift in careers. But the creative flow of music and design actually felt very similar.

  Personal essays organically emerged from this writing – stories that I did not necessarily include on my design website. These became my private toe dipping. I wrote about my experiences as an oboist and tried to convey in writing what this ephemeral thing of performance actually felt like. Then, one night, the floodgates opened and vivid memories of childhood came up. I quickly amassed about 20,000 words. It was at this point I realized I was actually writing a memoir, although I’d been trying to convince myself I wasn’t! But for some reason the drive to continue exploring my life in essays outweighed the embarrassment of writing a memoir that I was sure no one would read let alone get published! Now I see the three careers: music, design and writing, as my continuum of creativity.

  LK: Were there any parts of the book that were difficult to write?

  MB: Anyone who embarks on the daunting task of memoir must tell stories that are private and, at times, feel shameful. My childhood was essentially love starved, and it was through the diligent process of getting the words on the page, day after day, that I actually found the correct quality of distance in which to tell my story. It’s as if I almost became another person – separate from the young girl I was writing about. I used another technique as well, which I see in retrospect: whatever I divulged, no matter how difficult, I tried to write those passages in the most lyrical way possible. This intention helped to ease the hard truths that I revealed in my memoir.

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  LK: You paint some pretty specific portraits of New York in the 70’s. Can you talk about a moment in the book that brought you back to that place?

  MB: Playing at the Abyssinian Baptist church in Harlem was one of my most vivid memories. There’s nothing like a Baptist church service to bring you into a world that is potent and also wonderful, and in a strange way, urgent. I met musicians there that I continued to play with throughout my career – wonderful friendships and connections that all started in that church in Harlem. Those services were always pure pleasure and at times provided a needed comfort.

  Since I’ve lived in NYC for over 40 years now, the best part of writing about this town is that I can easily visit all my old haunts: a Village restaurant, various apartment buildings, and of course, concert halls. And as much as everything changes in NYC, nothing really ever changes! We New Yorkers know this. I found myself standing on the familiar streets of my past and the memories felt alive and solid. Memory is an important link to the past in NYC.

  LK: Talk about the process of writing memoir. Did it remind you of playing the oboe? In what ways?

  MB: I find all the components of making art to have similarities. In a structural way words are like musical notes, sentences are like musical phrases, a paragraph is like a movement and a book is like a complete composition. When you are playing a piece of music, you can’t really know your interpretation of, for instance, the cadenza at the end of the concerto, until you actually have the experience of playing through the piece. Because, the development of this expression is linear and that very process will ultimately inform how a cadenza should be interpreted. In the same way, a book doesn’t know itself until it is written through, to a large extent. Completing the rough draft of a book allows the writer to then understand how the beginning should feel and sound. When this process is truly played out, that is when voice can emerge. In memoir, voice is probably the most important aspect, because voice is what will draw in the reader. The voice (just like sound on an instrument) must be trusted and ring true from the first word to the last.

  LK: Has art saved your life?

  MB: Creativity has been the guiding light that I’ve relied upon throughout my life, both in tough times but also, while performing on stage during exceptionally transcendent moments. In this sense, my ability to live within a world of “art” has helped me to manage what ever came my way. Additionally, music is truly universal. Sound waves literally never end. So I believe that the world is actually organized by this continuous ripple effect of sound/ music. I was lucky to understand this intuitively as a child and then as I matured as an artist, this profound certainty changed my life in ways that still astonish me. And it’s all in my book.

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Print Marked Items
Butler, Marcia: THE SKIN ABOVE MY KNEE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Dec. 1, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
Butler, Marcia THE SKIN ABOVE MY KNEE Little, Brown (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 2, 21 ISBN: 978-0-316-39228-
0
Can music save a person's life?For professional oboist Butler, the answer is yes. Her brutally honest memoir recounts
the life of a woman who was able to overcome devastating emotional and physical pain, sometimes self-inflicted,
thanks to the music she loved and performed. Her father was a creepy and violent man who once smashed her sister's
face with a brutal punch. He haunts this book, while the author's mother comes across as weak, quiet, and passive in the
background. There seemed to be little love in the household. However, there was music, and Butler grabbed on to it like
a life raft. As a 4-year-old, she was mesmerized by Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde and singer Kirsten Flagstad.
Butler picked up the flute in fourth grade and later, when her music teacher asked for a volunteer to play a new
instrument, she took on the oboe. The music and hours of practice were always there for her when her parents weren't.
The book proceeds chronologically, with many italicized chapters interspersed. These are mainly about music and
performing and her favorite composers, and they're a welcome respite from the pain of her personal story. Eventually,
Butler got into a conservatory in New York City and worked odd jobs to survive. Her low self-esteem and unrelenting
search for a new father figure led to a failed marriage, abusive boyfriends, drugs, and even a suicide attempt. But there
was always the music, and she writes lovingly and beautifully about it. She tells us about making reeds for her oboe,
why many conductors aren't worth their salt, how difficult and "glorious" it is to work as a freelance musician with
great composers (Andre Watts, Keith Jarrett), and the utter joy of performing Bach's St. Matthew Passion, which "tests
the endurance of all oboists." The light and the dark fight it out in this fierce, fiery memoir.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Butler, Marcia: THE SKIN ABOVE MY KNEE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2016. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA471901837&it=r&asid=46b37181a1f727553b47b906ce07491d.
Accessed 27 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A471901837

---

9/27/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1506562550342 2/3
The Skin Above My Knee
Publishers Weekly.
263.51 (Dec. 12, 2016): p138.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
The Skin Above My Knee
Mareia Butler. Little, Brown, $27 (272p)
ISBN 978-0-316-39228-0
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
With unflinching honesty, Butler, a professional oboist for 25 years, recalls her love of music and how it saved her. One
of her earliest memories of what would bloom into the lifelong love affair is of lying on the floor at age four and
listening to her favorite opera singer, Kirsten Flagstad, in Tristan and Isolde while her mother vacuumed. Even at that
young age she "implicitly understood" that music is "marvelously transcendent." Her protective parental bubble was
short-lived, as she realized that her chilly and unaffectionate mother couldn't show her the love she craved; her father
was violent and abusive with her older sister and later molested Butler herself. Her salvation came when she was 12
and the band director asked for a volunteer to take up the oboe. But she had to strike a devil's bargain, submitting to her
father's demands in order to get rides to lessons. Butler escaped to music school at Mannes, but the lasting effects of her
mother's indifference and her father's abuse wrought havoc on her personal life, specifically in the men she chose to
date and the one whom she briefly married. She learned painful lessons, and shares them courageously along with her
hard-earned wisdom about what to hold onto and what to let go. In the end, this is a moving account of how passion
and creativity can be powerful weapons against neglect, cruelty, and self-harm. (Feb.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Skin Above My Knee." Publishers Weekly, 12 Dec. 2016, p. 138+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475225101&it=r&asid=269cb4b09c97d1317706a3e3764cbb7a.
Accessed 27 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475225101

---

9/27/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1506562550342 3/3
The Skin above My Knee
Annie Bostrom
Booklist.
113.5 (Nov. 1, 2016): p21.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text: 
The Skin above My Knee. By Marcia Butler. Feb. 2017.272p. Little, Brown, $27 (9780316392280). 788.5.
Oboist Butler's impressive memoir, her first book, is the story of her career in, and abiding love for, music. She gained a
childhood appreciation for the Wagner records her mother, aggressively distant, would play while vacuuming, and
soprano Kirsten Flagstad's performance as Isolde is a recurring motif throughout Butler's reminiscences of her life.
Butler also draws on operas to make sense of the men in her life: her abusive father is Wotan to her Brunnhilde; an
alluring and dangerous ex-boyfriend is Don Giovanni, or just Don G.; and her abusive and jealous ex-husband is Faust's
demon, Mephisto. Butler's worst days, the drug-fueled and suicidal ones, occur when she abandons music, or tips too
deeply into the absence of her mother's love. (Her mother is also the inspiration for the book's intriguing title.) In the
book's acknowledgments, Butler refers to herself as a "not-so-sure writer," but her readers will happily disagree; her
imaginative prose fires the senses dramatically. Music aficionados will find an extraordinarily kindred spirit here, and
lovers of memoir will find this a sensationally satisfying one.--Annie Bostrom
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Bostrom, Annie. "The Skin above My Knee." Booklist, 1 Nov. 2016, p. 21+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA471142778&it=r&asid=c6b4ae14120b0b65399fff8d606a009c.
Accessed 27 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A471142778

"Butler, Marcia: THE SKIN ABOVE MY KNEE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA471901837&it=r. Accessed 27 Sept. 2017. "The Skin Above My Knee." Publishers Weekly, 12 Dec. 2016, p. 138+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475225101&it=r. Accessed 27 Sept. 2017. Bostrom, Annie. "The Skin above My Knee." Booklist, 1 Nov. 2016, p. 21+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA471142778&it=r. Accessed 27 Sept. 2017.

• The Washington Post
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/the-skin-above-my-knee-by-marcia-butler/2017/03/02/844f81d2-fe9b-11e6-8f41-ea6ed597e4ca_story.html?utm_term=.f13cfc961b6a
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  Books
  ‘The Skin Above My Knee,’ by Marcia Butler
  By Eugenia Zukerman March 2
  How did Marcia Butler, a distinguished oboist, save herself from a detached, withholding mother and a sexually abusive father? In “The Skin Above My Knee,” she reveals the answer and more. Her story is a tale of triumph over a childhood rife with abuse yet blessed with talent. Filled with insight and honesty, her memoir flows like a series of gorgeous musical phrases, taking the reader on a journey as uplifting as it is disturbing.

  (Little, Brown)
  In the opening pages, we see her lying on the living room carpet on Sunday mornings as her mother callously vacuums around her. Four-year-old Marcia was swept away by listening to the radio voice of Kirsten Flagstad singing Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde.” “A new and pleasurable sensation sank deep into my tummy, like a very heavy anchor with no water to resist its plunge,” she writes. “Kirsten shook me awake. With the distance of time, I suppose it was love. . . . I was hooked.”

  But Marcia was also hooked on trying to understand her mother. “I cobbled together weekly rituals through which I might pretend to be close to her and imaginatively pierce her thick veneer,” she writes. Sleep became Marcia’s method of comfort: “Everyone sleeps, but not everyone could use music the way I did. If sleep was an unconscious draft of lifesaving elixir, music was its waking counterpart.”

  In fourth grade Marcia chose “the flute because its sweet, open quality most resembled Kirsten’s burnished, silvery voice.” But at age 12, when a music teacher asked the class for one volunteer to play the oboe, Marcia’s hand shot up. She realized that “while I wanted to fit in, I needed to stand out.”

  Her father agreed to drive his daughter 30 minutes each way to oboe lessons. In return, Marcia was tacitly expected to “cozy up” when they got home. “I squirmed uncomfortably in his lap, as I tried to figure out what I was feeling. My father took hold of my shoulder to still me. He looked into my sweet little-girl blue eyes with his steel-trap blue raptor eyes.”

  Add to this unwholesome mix an older sister named Jinx who was also abused. With Jinx, Dad’s preferred method of teaching her a lesson was “through force.” So Jinx was the punching bag, while Marcia became “the strange one who blew the oboe and shunned a typical teenager’s life.” As she explains it: “I had a different kind of best friend, other kids would learn, and it wasn’t a human being. I eschewed people for a stick of granadilla wood.”

  Throughout high school, Marcia “practiced longer than seemed reasonable,” and with her “highly developed, almost desperate sense of discipline,” she became “a small-town star.” In the fall of 1973, when she was 18, Marcia was accepted into several superb music schools and chose the Mannes College, where she received a full scholarship. She moved to New York without parental support and found a job as a live-in nanny. But when the kids proved difficult and Marcia quit, she was out on her own in the big city, facing endless challenges.

  (Deborah Donenfeld/Marcia Butler)
  A head of iceberg lettuce sometimes sufficed as her one meal of the day. She went to school, practiced many hours and worked at bars at night, and by the time she graduated from Mannes, she had established herself as a top freelance player, a chamber musician, a soloist. She got Broadway gigs.

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  Her distinctive sound set her apart. “Sound is like a fingerprint to musicians,” she writes. “To fully and freely express music with commitment, your sound must reside deep in a corner pocket, like a cube of sugar left on the tongue to disintegrate in its own time. You have a sound ringing in your ears all day every day that cannot be silenced. It is your essence — your soul turned inside out, exposing you for the world to notice, scrutinize, and perhaps love.”

  And speaking of love, Marcia describes the poisonous imprint of her childhood as she went out into the world and interacted with men her own age: “After years on my father’s lap, my male object of desire was pure and simple: I had to fear him; I needed the danger.” Astonishingly, toxic parents, drugs and abusive men could never silence her greatest love: music. Her courageous memoir is a testament to the power of art to inspire and heal.

  Eugenia Zukerman is the music director of Clarion Concerts in Columbia County, N.Y., as well as the artistic director of Classics on Hudson.

  THE SKIN ABOVE MY KNEE
  A Memoir
  By Marcia Butler

  Little, Brown. 258 pp. $27

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  Songs of Themselves
  By MEGHAN DAUMFEB. 2, 2017
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  The observation that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” has been attributed to everyone from Martin Mull to Frank Zappa to Thelonious Monk. It’s famous enough that it’s almost hackneyed by now, yet it’s as good a description as any for the nearly impossible task of using words to describe the sacredly wordless. Get bogged down in technical terms like diatonic interval and chromatic diesis and you risk sounding gratingly wonkish. Indulge in platitudes like “lyrical melody” and “haunting chords” and you’re a pathetic lightweight, a philistine.

  So you’ve got to hand it to musicians who put down their instruments long enough to write entire books. Classical musicians, especially, carry a set of burdens that can make cross-genre endeavors uniquely challenging. They are confined to practice rooms for hours, days and years on end and tyrannized by necessary perfectionism; their achievements in many ways rest on their ability to shut out the noise of the outside world and play the same set of notes again and again. And while that can yield fine results, it doesn’t always lend itself to the kind of divine hubris required to put your thoughts in print and expect anyone to care enough to read them.

  In a memoir published last year and two forthcoming this month, an oboist, a concert pianist and a guitarist set out to map the intersections of their musical lives and the much thornier vagaries of life in general. For Marcia Butler, the oboe was a protective garment and a ticket to the world, though both applications came at a steep price. As an awkward, antisocial preadolescent in 1960s Long Island, Butler is coerced into “a binding and sickening pact” with her father; if she confers sexual arousal by sitting on his lap, he will drive her to oboe lessons. “My father was my epic Wagnerian Wotan,” Butler writes in THE SKIN ABOVE MY KNEE: A Memoir (Little, Brown, $27), referring to Richard Wagner’s ruthless patriarch. “I was his dutiful daughter Brünnhilde.”

  Butler wins a scholarship to the Mannes College of Music, where she undergoes the perfunctory comeuppances of high-level music study, including an assignment to go back to the basics and practice nothing but long tones for three mind-numbing months. Long tones are notes held until you run out of breath, and anyone who’s ever seriously studied a wind instrument (I played the oboe with varying degrees of resolve from childhood through college) will experience traumatic flashbacks reading about Butler’s stages of grief around this situation. “The time spent crying could be used for playing the long tones,” she writes. “You do as you’re told.”

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  Outside the conservatory, it’s 1970s New York City, and Butler by default embarks on the hero’s journey particular to that time and place, stealing food and spare change from a roommate, riding the subway with fake tokens and sleeping with an assortment of grungy ne’er-do-wells, including one who winds up at Rikers Island for what Butler later learns was a rape at gunpoint. In one especially affecting scene, Butler plays a Harlem church gig and is discreetly acknowledged by a congregant who recognizes her from the bus to Rikers.

  “That was the thing about being a girl who played the oboe and had a boyfriend in the clink,” Butler explains, in what is surely the only time such a sentence has ever been committed to paper. “It was easy for me to separate the two realities and carry on as if all were harmoniously blended.”

  If the colluding forces of her father’s abuse, her relentless self-discipline, and her love of opera and similarly concupiscent classical works split Butler into two discordant and ultimately incompatible halves — dutiful nerd on one side, hot mess on the other — James Rhodes’s dysfunction broke him into the proverbial million little pieces. A late-blooming British virtuoso pianist who found celebrity in part by styling himself as a sort of rock ’n’ roll bad boy of the classical world — his albums have titles like “Razor Blades, Little Pills and Big Pianos” — Rhodes never landed in jail. But reading INSTRUMENTAL: A Memoir of Madness, Medication, and Music (Bloomsbury, $27), you get the sense he wishes he could claim such dramatic levels of bottoming out. If his first love is music, his second is his own destruction. As a child he endured sexual abuse by a teacher that was horrific enough to result in long-term physical disability as well as psychological damage that led to promiscuity, substance abuse, dissociative identity disorder, suicidal ideation and self-injury. At one point, he takes off his shirt and shows his wife that he’s carved the word “toxic” into his arm with a razor blade.

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  Rhodes would like us to know that he’s in good company. Musicians, even powdered-wig types like Bach and Mozart, are notorious for making train wrecks of their personal lives. As proof, Rhodes splices his own story with interstitial mini-bios of great composers, leaning heavily on the tortured nature of their genius and attendant psychosis. Schubert was “a walking, talking car crash,” Beethoven’s family was “riddled with alcoholism, domestic violence, abuse and cruelty,” and Schumann, a failed suicide, died “alone and afraid” in an asylum, but not before writing “Geister (Ghost) Variations,” a piece “so called because he said that ghosts had dictated the opening theme to him.”

  Butler’s book also contains italicized interstitial sections, which she deploys to show the grueling process of learning a piece of music, making reeds or the cobbled-together life of a working musician. But while “The Skin Above My Knee” is overwritten in places (it would appear the author never met an adjective she couldn’t find a job for), it ultimately succeeds because it leaves readers knowing a thing or two about an esoteric world they probably never thought about before. “Instrumental,” for its part, hews desperately to the well-trod conventions of the well-trod genre known as Portrait of the Artist as a Young, Self-Hating Narcissist.

  Quoting from “Instrumental” is tricky, since Rhodes drops an unprintable-in-a-family-newspaper epithet at least once a page. He is quite good at articulating the often intractable dimensions of shame as experienced by sexual abuse survivors. But he seems almost chemically dependent on the F-word and its innumerable iterations. His use is excessive even by the standards of the digital age, according to which “voicey” writers on the web reflexively opt for lazy vernacular as a way of branding themselves as insouciant badasses. The effect, however, is nearly always tedious and soporific, the verbal equivalent of a weary double-reed player blowing nothing but remedial long tones.

  An antidote, at least of a sort, can be found in Andrew Schulman, whose earnest but affable memoir, WAKING THE SPIRIT: A Musician’s Journey Healing Body, Mind, and Soul (Picador, $25), uses the author’s own story as the first movement rather than the entire symphony. In 2009, Schulman was placed in a medically induced coma following a cascade of post-surgical complications and thought to be near death until his wife, Wendy, pressed an earbud to his head and played Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion.” Within hours, his vital signs stabilized, his life saved by “the passion of Wendy and Bach.”

  Once recovered, Schulman pursues a second career as a volunteer “medical musician,” enrolling in the hospital’s music therapy program and eventually returning to the same intensive care ward where he was once a patient. If Schulman seems a little too dazzled by the notion of his own healing powers — several scenes show patients taking miraculous turns as he strums his guitar next to their beds — he redeems himself with his willingness to take on some real research and reporting. He talks with neuroscientists and psychiatrists and explores the legacy of Pythagoras, the ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher who was among the first to recognize the healing properties of music. Along the way, Schulman posits that the relationship between the pain we feel and the songs and compositions we love has its roots in a tender, transcendent form of symbiosis. “Artists who used their music to alleviate their own suffering composed some of the greatest music ever written,” Schulman writes, “which in turn has the effect of ameliorating the suffering of others.”

  Not that there will ever be a cure for the suffering that music can sometimes inflict on the very musicians playing it. But, hey, it’s nice work if you can get it.

  Meghan Daum is the author, most recently, of “The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion.”

  A version of this article appears in print on February 5, 2017, on Page BR27 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Memoir. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

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  Mariana Enriquez’s Things We Lost in the Fire, Marcia Butler’s The Skin Above My Knee and Emily Robbins’s A Word for Love, reviewed
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  REVIEW
  Mariana Enriquez’s Things We Lost in the Fire, Marcia Butler’s The Skin Above My Knee and Emily Robbins’s A Word for Love, reviewed

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  SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
  MARCH 24, 2017
  FEBRUARY 24, 2017
  Things We Lost in the Fire

  By Mariana Enriquez, translated by Megan McDowell

  Hogarth, 208 pages, $32

  A well-published author in Spanish, this collection is Mariana Enriquez's English-language debut and, according to translator Megan McDowell, the work in which Enriquez comments most closely on the legacy of Argentina's 20th century. Latin American writing is, for many, still synonymous with magic realism. But as we saw last year with Guillermo Saccomanno's Gesell Dome, a writer can just as effectively address Argentina's history of state violence through noir – or, in the case of Enriquez, gothic. Enriquez was born in 1973, meaning she lived through the Dirty War but came of age during the tumultuous era of democratization (depicted here in The Intoxicated Years). In Things We Lost in the Fire, Enriquez is light on the supernatural – there are ghosts of torture, skeletons mixed in concrete, ghouls of medical experimentation – but these brief visitations from the past only add to the prevailing sense of malaise. The real horror, with the spectre of poverty and gender-based violence, is the present.

  The Skin Above My Knee

  By Marcia Butler

  Little, Brown, 272 pages, $35

  Rare is the new New York story. Some cities are so saturated with reference, few are the opportunities to sight-read the place – we've already read it too many times before. Sari Wilson's debut novel from last year, Girl Through Glass, managed to make New York new again. So does Marcia Butler in The Skin Above My Knee, a memoir alternating between revelations from Butler's life in music, including her 25 years as a professional oboist, and her rocky personal life, starting with her childhood in an abusive household. As in Wilson's novel, the city is not the focus of Butler's memoir, but it could happen only in New York. In a particularly poignant juxtaposition, Butler visits a boyfriend at Rikers Island jail one day and plays a church service in Harlem the next. This moment, and indeed the entire book, teaches us that life is not easily compartmentalized. Butler seeks requited love; she finds in music universal connection.

  A Word for Love

  By Emily Robbins

  STORY CONTINUES BELOW ADVERTISEMENT

  Riverhead, 304 pages, $36

  A naive American student travels to Damascus just as unrest against the Syrian President stirs – a setup that may give readers pause, but don't dismiss A Word for Love out of hand. Bea doesn't exactly fit the trope of the ignorant American; it's because she has just enough knowledge as a young scholar of Arabic that she presents a danger to her host family. Lured to Damascus by the promise of an "astonishing text" – a version of the love story of Qais and Leila said to move readers to tears – Bea witnesses a blossoming romance between the family maid and a policeman, and feels compelled to act. Bea's crime is not ignorance but "carelessness with information." Although set in Damascus prior to the civil war, Emily Robbins's debut novel is not about Syria so much as dictatorship in general and the unintended consequences of interventionism. It is also a lyrical study of love and loss, one not to be overlooked.

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