The Skin Above My Knee

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.)