Visiting Hours by Amy Butcher
With echoes of Darin Strauss' Half a Life and Cheryl Strayed's Wild comes a beautifully written, riveting memoir that examines the complexities of friendship in the aftermath of a tragedy.Four weeks before their college graduation, twenty-one-year-old Kevin Schaeffer walked Amy Butcher to her home in their college town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Hours after parting ways with Amy, he fatally stabbed his ex-girlfriend, Emily Silverstein. While he awaited trial, psychiatrists concluded he had suffered an acute psychotic break. Amy was severely affected by Kevin's crime but remained devoted to him as a friend. Over time she became obsessed--determined to discover the narrative that explained what Kevin had done, believing that Kevin's actions were the direct result of his untreated illness.The tragedy deeply shook her concept of reality, disrupted her sense of right and wrong, and dismantled every conceivable notion she'd established about herself and her relation to the world. Amy eventually realized that she'd never have the answers, or find personal peace, unless she went after them herself. She drove across the country back to Gettysburg for the first time in the three years since graduation to sift through hundreds of pages of public records--mental health evaluations, detectives' notes, inventories of evidence, search warrants, testimonies, even Kevin's own confession.This is Amy Butcher's deeply personal, heart-wrenching account of the consequences of failing her friend when perhaps he needed one most. It's the story of how trauma affects memory and the way a friendship changes and often strengthens through seemingly insurmountable challenges. Ultimately, it's a powerful testament to the bonds we share with others and the profound resiliency and strength of the human spirit.Amy Butcher is the author of Visiting Hours and an essayist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Granta, Harper's, The Iowa Review, Lit Hub, Guernica, Brevity, and others. Excerpts of Mothertrucker, which is currently being developed into a major motion picture, earned a 2020 Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, and Amy's additional work has benefited from awards and grants from the Vermont Studio Center, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Stanley Awards for International Research, and the Olive B. O'Connor Fellowship in Creative Writing from Colgate University. She earned her MFA from the University of Iowa and presently serves as the director of creative writing and an associate professor of English at Ohio Wesleyan University. Amy teaches annually at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival and the Sitka Fine Arts Camp in Sitka, Alaska, and she lives in Ohio with her three rescue dogs, beautiful beasts. For more information visit www.amyebutcher.com.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780399172076 |
| ISBN 10 | 0399172076 |
| Title | Visiting Hours |
| Author | Amy Butcher |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Blue Rider Press |
| Year published | 2015-04-07 |
| Number of pages | 272 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |