- Blue Rider Press
- Amy Butcher’s Visiting Hours.
The premise of Amy Butcher’s new book, Visiting Hours: A Memoir of Friendship and Murder (Blue Rider Press), is objectively terrifying: In 2009, Butcher’s friend, Kevin Schaeffer, murdered his ex-girlfriend, Emily Silverstein, while Butcher, Schaeffer, and Silverstein were all undergrads at Gettysburg College. Schaeffer’s crime would go on to haunt Butcher, who suffered from PTSD in the years following, and who was for a long time convinced that she was the last woman Schaeffer saw before he killed Silverstein.
Butcher’s prose is compulsively readable, and as a sucker for literary-minded true crime, I tore through Visiting Hours. But I was just as frustrated as I was enthralled. Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Liz Arnold digs into some of the book’s major problems. Among them? Butcher’s narrative relies on the idea that what made Schaeffer’s crime so hard to understand was his relative innocence, an innocence Butcher shares with him, and that she identifies as the natural result of happy childhoods free from any “defining difficulty.” This premise doesn’t hold up, though—later in the book, Butcher reveals that Schaeffer attempted suicide during junior year, while she was studying abroad.
“If this structuring helped Butcher shape the arc of her story, it feels insensitive, not to say irresponsible, to manipulate the reader thus…” writes Arnold, and I agree with her. “Leaving out what she knows in order to build suspense prevents her from investigating themes that might have layered this work with meaning and texture… And how else might she be holding out on us?”
It gets weirder. Arnold continues:
…Which brings me to another key piece of withheld information: close to the end of the book, Butcher reveals that she experienced “suicidal ideation” when she was 13. But having characterized her childhood as easy and sheltered (with no “defining difficulty”), having earlier insisted she had “no experience addressing issues of mental illness,” this admission is suspect — as is her earlier candor. Moreover, it’s difficult for the reader to believe that when Butcher sat next to a gun in a closet “for hours at a time,” her “profound unsettlement” (which lifted a few months later, instantly, while looking at the Seine) was “the same pain that Kevin likely felt for months, for over a year.” If it were the same, how could it be given such a light touch in the book?
And this isn’t the first time that she exhibits an uncomfortable inclination to identify with Kevin. Referring to both him and the victim as “my parallel,” she writes, “what I’ve identified in Kevin is something I’m nearly certain is in everyone.” This line of thinking results in a kind of horror and sympathy for the narrator she may not have intended.
Generally speaking, I’m into unreliable narrators, as long as their unreliability is intentional and employed carefully. And there are certainly plenty of precedents for unreliable narrators in memoir, the genre Butcher’s working in. But Butcher’s unreliable narration—claiming one thing that seems central to her story’s dramatic tension, then contradicting it—reads at best like an accident, and at worst—as Arnold says—as needlessly withholding from her reader. Indeed, I found it problematic enough to wonder what other information was left out of Butcher’s account.
Dig a little deeper, and there are some striking omissions. For example, Butcher reports on the state of access to mental health care “for our men,” but doesn’t address another form of gendered violence that contributed to the book’s central crime: domestic violence. She doesn’t interrogate the fact that Silverstein’s killing was an act of intimate-partner violence; for context, the World Health Organization estimates that 40-70 percent of female murder victims “were killed by their husband or boyfriend.” Neither does she discuss Schaeffer’s history of alleged emotional abuse in relationships, a warning sign detailed in writeups on the case everywhere from college newspaper coverage to Cosmopolitan.
But the book’s most startling omission is of Silverstein herself. Though Butcher wonders about Silverstein—”I wonder now if Emily had ever been to Europe, or if she wanted to go, of what color she’d paint her toenails if she was around to paint them now”—and seeks out details about her—”I learned she liked watermelon. That her favorite sport was swimming… She was a vegetarian, a Cancer, a member of Amnesty International”—she never attempts to contact the people who knew Silverstein the best—her family.
To be fair, Butcher isn’t a journalist. Nowhere is she obligated to write, “Silverstein’s family did not return requests for comment.” But it does seems strange that Butcher identifies with Silverstein so strongly, that she inserts herself into Silverstein’s story, going so far as to call her “my parallel”—but makes no effort to know Silverstein beyond this rather superficial set of details. Certainly, Schaeffer was Butcher’s friend, her primary connection to the crime. But to leave out a substantive treatment of his victim is its own bizarre erasure. “I am terrified to contact her family,” she writes by way of explanation. “I am terrified to show up at their home.”
I believe her. But good—not to mention ethical—writing about terrible things should be terrifying. It should be uncomfortable. While reading Visiting Hours, I happened to meet up with a friend of mine who writes almost exclusively about awful things, much of it true crime, and when I described my difficulty with Butcher’s book, this friend wondered out loud, “If you aren’t going to reckon with something like that, why write about it at all?”
This sentiment, I think, distilled my reaction to Visiting Hours. In spite of its violent subject matter, it isn’t a reckoning. The stakes, it turns out, are actually quite low. The book opens already knowing where it’s headed, and doesn’t divert from that path. It asks questions it already knows the answers to. It doesn’t feel genuinely risky.
By saying that, I don’t mean to discredit Butcher’s struggle; indeed, it must be its own particular hell to know that someone you care deeply about has done something so objectively horrible. I’m reminded of a statement on another case of intimate-partner violence written by Owen Pallett, a friend of Jian Ghomeshi, after allegations of abuse came out against Ghomeshi. It’s a terse, brave missive, that concludes by saying, “Jian Ghomeshi is my friend, and Jian Ghomeshi beats women. How our friendship will continue remains to be seen.”
A better book might have reckoned with this difficult state of things. But Visiting Hours is not that book.