The Skin Above My Knee
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5.0 • 5 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
The unflinching story of a professional oboist who finds order and beauty in music as her personal life threatens to destroy her.
Music was everything for Marcia Butler. Growing up in an emotionally desolate home with an abusive father and a distant mother, she devoted herself to the discipline and rigor of the oboe, and quickly became a young prodigy on the rise in New York City's competitive music scene.
But haunted by troubling childhood memories while balancing the challenges of a busy life as a working musician, Marcia succumbed to dangerous men, drugs and self-destruction. In her darkest moments, she asked the hardest question of all: Could music truly save her life?
A memoir of startling honesty and subtle, profound beauty, The Skin Above My Knee is the story of a woman finding strength in her creative gifts and artistic destiny. Filled with vivid portraits of 1970's New York City, and fascinating insights into the intensity and precision necessary for a career in professional music, this is more than a narrative of a brilliant musician struggling to make it big in the big city. It is the story of a survivor.
One of 2017's 35 over 35 One of the Washington Post's Top 10 Classical Music Moments of the Year
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
Customer Reviews
Great book !
Fantastic read , extremely compelling!
A compassionate cautionary story
In this book Ms. Butler tells the story of her trials and tribulations in a brutally honest and beautifully written manner. This is a story that serves as a cautionary tale and at the same time engenders empathy. This telling of a life of familial abandonment, abuse, and salvation by art is important, even vital.