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Not quite a biography of Octavia E. Butler, this piece of nonfiction is a lot more deliberately artistic in style than biographies often attempt. I was deeply thrown off by this at first, but the longer I read the more I could get the feel for what the author was going for and understand the stylistic choices. It's like the author is trying to build an impressionistic art piece around the idea of Butler as a growing writer, rather than conveying information necessarily.
However, one of the things this means is that it does a lot of just stating things about the interiority of the biographical subject in ways that seem like they cannot necessarily be knowable. Maybe some of it comes from her diaries, maybe some of it is imagined by the mind of the author, it is not clear! Although an accurate image of the actual Butler is maybe not exactly what the author is going for??
(Lest you get the wrong idea, this book is clearly grounded in a great deal of genuine research into Butler's life, thoughts, and experiences, and contains extensive quotes from Butler herself; it's just that the book also says a lot of things that don't seem like they could be knowable even from lots of research.)
Anyway, I appreciate the interesting approach this book is using, but it's not exactly my thing. The arty impressionistic prose style is one that gets me bored rather than riveted, so I must admit I did a fair amount of skimming. But I like it a lot better than I thought I was going to when I was starting to read it. And I super respect it for the interesting things it's doing, and doing successfully, I think.
However, one of the things this means is that it does a lot of just stating things about the interiority of the biographical subject in ways that seem like they cannot necessarily be knowable. Maybe some of it comes from her diaries, maybe some of it is imagined by the mind of the author, it is not clear! Although an accurate image of the actual Butler is maybe not exactly what the author is going for??
(Lest you get the wrong idea, this book is clearly grounded in a great deal of genuine research into Butler's life, thoughts, and experiences, and contains extensive quotes from Butler herself; it's just that the book also says a lot of things that don't seem like they could be knowable even from lots of research.)
Anyway, I appreciate the interesting approach this book is using, but it's not exactly my thing. The arty impressionistic prose style is one that gets me bored rather than riveted, so I must admit I did a fair amount of skimming. But I like it a lot better than I thought I was going to when I was starting to read it. And I super respect it for the interesting things it's doing, and doing successfully, I think.
