The Gilded Butterfly Effect: Golden, Spastic, and Wholly Introspective
I am so thankful to have received an advance copy from Heather Colley to read and review!
Spoiler-FreeBeginning my first semester of university as the fresh-eyed freshman I am provided the perfect background for reading Heather Colley’s The Gilded Butterfly Effect. That, and the northern university campus life, were where relatability stopped, as the novel veered into the darker reaches of party culture - drugs, drinking, sex, and, particularly, all four together at once.
Despite the stark contrast to my usual reading taste, Colley’s control over her subject matter drew me in. The novel reads less as a sensational campus story and more as a tightly constructed character study, one that examines psychological unraveling with restraint. And it being a campus character study of two disturbed women seemed a great warning tale as I began my life as a university student in New York.
As I read during late-night pockets of free time throughout the semester, Penny and Stella’s (the novel’s main characters) hardships and worries, while not identical to mine, became a sort of mirror to my own. While the two protagonists’ perspectives do not differ on a linguistic level (a choice that made it a bit hard to follow the narrative for me, personally) Colley compensates by pacing their voices in a way that offers momentary reprieve.
Colley’s ability to impose a sense of inevitability on her narrative works through fizzy, temporal, sensational descriptions. The prose repeatedly gestures toward endings: of youth, of possibility, of selfhood. The moments of calm, often described during the day, feel temporary and survival-oriented, as though the text itself anticipates collapse during the following nightly party.
The novel’s claustrophobic atmosphere is jarring as its setting is a sprawling, lively campus. Repetitive descriptions of parties and the liminal spaces between them compress time and place, creating the impression that the characters are trapped within an endless loop on campus. Colley’s use of cryptic capitalization of concepts like “the future” and social classes offers an almost all-knowing, objective judgmental perspective. And the drugs... the drugs can be seen as their own character: stealthily traded and prevalent in every corner of every room of every building on Michigan’s campus.
Where the novel leaves me wanting more is in its brief engagement with generational damage. Stella’s emotionally vacant yet materially involved mother, in particular, casts Stella into a prematurely maternal role. In doing so, Colley sheds light on how families control the rate at which their children mature and how detrimental it is to their livelihoods, with Stella and Penny’s mother-sisterly relationship being particularly out of place in the hostility of sorority life’s toxic recesses of addiction and social competition.
I have not faced the demons Colley writes about, so I hesitate to judge the characters’ actions. Still, the novel’s emotional logic is evocative. Its central concern, the danger of over-dependence, whether on people, substances, or events, is rendered with a philosophical clarity. The simultaneous need to be free from responsibility and memory, and yet still needing to live with life’s suffering and consequences.
Despite its distance from my usual literary preferences, The Gilded Butterfly Effect demanded empathy from me. Colley does not ask the reader to excuse her characters’ developments - and in a novel so preoccupied with loss of self, understanding becomes its own balm for the sporadic fate of over-dependence.
"…felt so instrumental to what I desperately wanted: a sense of comfort, and easy simplicity, and happiness, in the way that I had felt it back in the before times—before the Spring, and even before the sorority itself” (Heather Colley, 83).
