An audio novel
The girl narrator Francie, aged 8, phones aunt Mimi who lives far away. She's worried about her mother. She's put tape-recorders in each room, a piece of folded paper over them, like a tent, as if hiding them. Aunt Mimi, who's very pregnant, talks to both of them, suggesting that they spend the night each in their own locked room. Next day the narrator stays with her babysitter who has a lampshade decorated with butterflies. A dead butterfly of the same type is dead in a glass of water. She drinks it down. She moves to live with Aunt Mimi in LA. Her mother is institutionalized. Over the years she returns to visit her mother, always with her uncle or aunt.
When she's 17 she visits her mother alone for the first time. Her mother has a relapse. Her mother has problems working out what is real. The narrator has trouble working out the boundaries of Self. Objects are reassuring.
Now she's 26. She lives in a 3rd floor flat, working in a framing store. She goes round yard-sales looking for items to resell. Vicky, Aunt Mimi's daughter, has set up a web site for her. She thinks back to 20 years before. The butterfly, and a stag beetle she found, then lost. And dead roses that appeared under curtains illustrating the very same roses. She becomes convinced that somehow the pictures of living things have become real dead things.
She puts a tent up on her balcony hoping that by going in there she'll remember better. She still likes being locked in her room overnight. Vicki tries to get her out of the habit of getting herself locked in overnight (a habit she started to stop herself killing Vicki) by staying with her and removing the lock. It doesn't work.
She learns that her mother was a promiscuous schoolgirl, her parents supplying contraceptives.
There's much going back in time. It's not confusing, though rather than having 3 main time-lines (living with mother, living with babysitter, living with aunt) I'd have been happier with 2 - just "now" and "then". I guess her tent experience awakens old memories, which is why her train journey that was mentioned early in the book also gets extensive attention towards the end. She recalls that 2 strange adults approached her on the train, asking for a paper/ticket.
She contacts the babysitter again. The babysitter offers to send her the lampshade. She accepts. When it arrives she sells it. She dismantles the tent.
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