Clea Simon--The Butterfly Trap

DEBORAH CROMBIE: It is always a treat to have the multi-talented author Clea Simon visit here on JRW. Clea writes both cozies and dark psychological suspense, which inspires transports of admiration from me--I can't imagine how you twist your brain into such different shapes! Clea's latest, THE BUTTERFLY TRAP, definitely falls on the suspense side of the ledger, and here she is to tell us what inspired it.

What patterns are playing out in your life?

 

Hi and thanks for having me here today! Or here again, I should say, since you’ve hosted me before. Which brings up the question I’ve been wrestling with lately: What are the patterns you see in your lives? And, maybe more to the point, how do we use them in our writing?

This hit home just last week when I found myself teetering on the verge of an old fight. In brief, I’d been home all day working on the computer, with the exception of a short (and very careful!) walk in the icy day. My darling husband Jon (no relation to Hank’s Jonathan) had gone to the Boston Public Library to do some research. (He’s retired, but that just means more time for his own writing projects.) And so when he came home, I nearly jumped on him, full of things I wanted to tell him. How the writing was going. What the cat did. Thoughts on the day’s news (oh, so many thoughts…). And I could almost see him recoil.

To explain, he’d been at the library, but he’d been dealing with people all day. And I? Well, I’d only been dealing with the people in my head. All of whom were dying to come out.

It was all too much. I caught myself, and he met me halfway, asking about the day’s work and more. But in that moment, I saw a dynamic I recognized.

You see, my mother was an artist – a painter and printmaker, who dabbled in other media as well and who also, of course, had the full responsibility for us kids. My father was a doctor. An internist with a private practice, who saw patients all day. Too often, that meant a conflict at the end of the day. He’d come home, tired and wanting some quiet. And she, who hadn’t spoken to an adult all day, would be bursting with thoughts – with ideas she wanted to share. Ready for contact. Needless to say, it didn’t always end well.

In the worst scenarios, the tension would simmer for about an hour. By then, we’d be sitting at the dinner table – because, of course, despite her own work, my mom had to have dinner on the table at six! At some point, my mother would start to needle my father. Little things. Half-said comments that she wouldn’t repeat. And, inevitably, at some point, my father would blow up. He was a big man with a big voice, so this would be loud and, frankly, scary. My mother would run off to the kitchen, crying. And I, her youngest (and female), would follow to comfort her, leaving my father at the table. But even then I would be aware that he wasn’t really angry. In fact, he’d be confused. What had happened? Why had he exploded? He was like the proverbial bull in the china shop at that point, unable to take another step without causing damage. And as I hugged my Mom in the kitchen, I also felt sympathy for him. They were caught in a pattern that neither had the awareness to break.

In retrospect, so many other factors played into their relationship – and into their fights. Her work, for one, was never taken as seriously as his – by my father, by society at large. It certainly didn’t bring in an equivalent amount of money, which is too often how we measure such things. And there had been an imbalance in the relationship from the start: She’d been the beautiful artist he had pursued, winning in part with the promise of being able to give her a comfortable life – as a doctor’s wife. But was that who she wanted to be? Although he supported her work (and, I believe, was proud when she sold to museums and was honored in juried shows), did he ever understand it?

I confess, it took another friend’s disastrous relationship to make me revisit these old patterns in my own life. He and his then-love had come to visit, and by the third day, while she was sleeping in, he and I were crying at the kitchen table. It was impossible, he was saying. She drank too much. She was crazy. “But R-,” I remember saying to him. “You like the crazy! You’re drawn to it!”

“I know, but…” he replied (at least as I remember it. In truth, he might have resisted my diagnosis a bit longer). And sometime that day, as they both packed to go, it hit me. These patterns of love and anger. Where the fulfillment of one dream means the denying of the other. The way we wreck the ones we adore. And that night, I began to write The Butterfly Trap, a he said/she said tale of love and obsession that explores the dynamics of relationships, gender roles and expectations, along with lots of blood, dirty deeds, and sex (hey, I do write to entertain!).

And me and Jon? I don’t know if I’m any more careful these days. But I’m certainly more aware. Patterns can so easily become habits, treads worn in our minds… leading us down a tragic path.

What about you? Do you see patterns from your family of origins that have persisted in your lives? Are they useful or can you learn from them? Let me know!

 

About The Butterfly Trap:

Anya and Greg seem to be the golden couple, until dark secrets come to light and unleash inevitable devastation in this slow-burn he said/she said psychological suspense novel.

 

Greg has his life all planned out: become a doctor, buy a house, and have a wife and children – and when he meets Anya during his post-doc studies in Boston, all of his dreams seem to come true. It’s love at first sight, and Greg doesn’t shy away from changing his life to provide Anya, his beautiful butterfly, with everything she wants and needs.

 

Anya is a struggling artist, determined to make it as a painter in Boston’s art scene – but getting involved with shy and sweet Greg could thwart her lifelong ambition. Their relationship unfolds like a classic love story . . . except that Anya seems to be hiding something that unsuspecting Greg soon must face.

 

Are Greg and Anya truly the perfect couple, or will jealousy, uncertainty, and dangerous machinations break them apart in the most dreadful way imaginable?

 

“The theme of fear and control in a relationship emerges in Simon’s slow-burn latest, along with the exploration of the many ways two people can deceive each other.” – Booklist

 

Before turning to a life of crime (fiction), Boston Globe-bestselling author Clea Simon was a journalist. A native of New York, she came to Massachusetts to attend Harvard University and never left. The author of three nonfiction books and 32 mysteries, most recently the psychological suspense The Butterfly Trap, her books alternate between cozies (usually featuring cats) and darker psychological suspense, like the Massachusetts Center for the Book “must reads” Hold Me Down and World Enough. She lives with her husband, the writer Jon S. Garelick (another Boston Globe alum), and their cat Thisbe in Somerville, Massachusetts.