My father called me after reading the first draft of this book. I was anxious to hear from him.

“Did you like it?” I asked.

He paused. My heart skipped a beat. “I loved it,” he said.

“But…” I pressed.

“But Leonard is so…awful.”

“He’s supposed to be,” I said. “That’s part of the story.”

“But Leonard is the father figure.”

Now I paused.

“Leonard’s not you, Dad,” I said. “He’s not even remotely based on you.”

There was a silence.

“I don’t know if other people will know that,” my father said. “After everything we’ve been through.”

 

He could be right.

“After everything we’ve been through” refers to the fact that, like Agnes, I was born into and grew up in a religious commune in upstate New York. People who already know this about me and my family may jump to conclusions when they read this book. They may think that this is, in fact, my story in disguise. But it isn’t. I am no more Agnes Little than my father is Leonard Little.

There are resemblances of course, the way any work of fiction vaguely resembles any author’s life. Growing up in the commune wasn’t exactly a barrel of laughs. Like Emmanuel, there was a leader whose sadistic tendencies flared often. As a child, separated from my parents at six months and raised in a mass nursery for the first three years of my life, I was afraid a lot of the time. The physical grounds in the novel are also similar to where I grew up, and I did have a best friend who was the beginning inspiration for Honey Harper. But everything else has either been made up or exaggerated in the hopes of creating a more believable, riveting story. That is the wonderful thing about writing: you get to start with inspiration and turn it into something else, something entirely different.

 

In her book, Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott has compiled some of the best advice I’ve ever read about writing. One of her suggestions to take the pressure off of writing perfectly is to think of what you are writing as a gift for someone who means a lot to you. I had this in mind when I began Patron Saint of Butterflies. And if this book can be considered worthy enough to be thought of as a gift, then I would extend it to all of the children who, along with myself, were born into and raised at the commune. I do not mean to suggest that the adults who lived there had any less of an experience, but my heart is especially attached to the children, who, because of their birthright, did not have a choice. The roads we traveled, both living at the commune, and then afterwards, when it fell apart, were not easy. Leaving the only world we knew, (however bizarre,) and trying to figure out how to navigate outside in the “real” world, was, at best, difficult. One of the greatest challenges I encountered as I struggled to adapt to the outside world was being cut off from the children I had spent the first third of my life with – some of whom I never saw again. Every once in a while, I would hear a little piece of news about one of them. Like me, they were floundering. Desperately. But as the years passed, I also heard that many of them were beginning to get back up. No longer children without a choice, they decided instead to become healthy, functioning adults, and began to build new lives.

This book is a testament to the strength of all those children.

Every single day, I remember you.

I miss you.