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“Marcia Butler narrates her memoir of rising above difficult circumstances through music…Her delivery is clear and well paced even as she recounts the pain of growing up…The narration is book-ended by short oboe performances, a fitting addition that provides context for the listener.”
— AudioFile
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“Marcia Butler has composed her own music here, and it is filled with passion and yearning and ultimately the kind of beauty that can save us all.”
— Andre Dubus III, New York Times bestselling author
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“A beautiful memoir—meticulously nuanced, daringly honest, and utterly inspiring.”
— Tim Page, Pulitzer Prize–winning music critic, Washington Post
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Brutally honest.... The light and the dark fight it out in this fierce, fiery memoir.
— Kirkus Reviews
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A moving account of how passion and creativity can be powerful weapons against neglect, cruelty, and self-harm.
— Publishers Weekly
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Impressive.... [Butler's] imaginative prose fires the senses dramatically. Music aficionados will find an extraordinarily kindred spirit here, and lovers of memoir will find this a sensationally satisfying one.
— Booklist
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Gorgeously written, The Skin Above My Knee takes the reader from the world's most lauded concert venues into the innermost sanctums of musician's lives in New York. Always honest and admirably adverse to self-pity, Marcia Butler's beautiful book cuts its devastating insights with poetic love for the world. My heart broke in several places, and leapt in several others. When I finished reading, I felt as if I understood music on a level usually reserved for world class musicians. Stunning.
— Marie-Helene Bertino, author of 2 A.M at The Cat's Pajamas
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Heartbreaking, page turning, and ultimately redemptive, The Skin Above My Knee is a dazzling memoir about life as an internationally recognized classical musician and about one woman's journey to the only sort of love that lasts-self-acceptance. An insider's look at the world of professional performance and a moving account of one woman's effort to transmute pain into beauty, this book will appeal to anyone who has ever wondered how you get to Carnegie Hall or how to survive family. Reader, she succeeds beautifully.
— E.J. Levy, author of Love, In Theory
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In The Skin Above My Knee, a classical musician takes a walk on the wild side and almost doesn't make it up the stairs. Butler's remarkable memoir of a New York City freelance musician's life does for classical music what Patti Smith's Just Kids did for proto-punk, and Eileen Myles's Inferno did for Lower East Side poetry.
— Tim Tomlinson, author of Requiem for the Tree Fort I Set on Fire
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Fierce and lyrical, honest and darkly funny, Marcia Butler's memoir is so good, I found myself canceling plans with friends so I could stay home with this ravishing book. Her gift with language is rare. Not only can she describe her descent into a spiral of self-destructive behavior so vividly that you fear for her life, she will, in the end, carry you away with the poetry of her words as she describes the transcendent power of music.
— Patrica McCormick, author of the National Book Award finalist Sold
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In her debut memoir, The Skin Above My Knee, Marcia Butler shows us how music - listening to it, playing it, losing it, and rediscovering it - can save us. With bravery and honesty, she unflinchingly tells her story. And through it all, music resonates and becomes the soundtrack for us all.
— Ann Hood, author of The Book That Matters Most