Rene Denfeld: What Happens After the Trauma

In The Butterfly Girl, Rene Denfeld’s third novel, twelve-year-old Celia is sexually abused by her stepfather and makes the “mistake of telling.” After her family and the courts label her “Celia the liar,” she ends up on the streets of Portland, Oregon sleeping beneath a freeway ramp, rooting out food from garbage bins—and relying on the butterflies who follow her to act as guardians and guides. 

Enter Naomi Cottle, the guarded and intuitive private investigator from Denfeld’s bestselling second novel The Child Finder. While searching for her own lost younger sister, Naomi is drawn into an investigation of Portland’s runaway girls, who keep turning up dead. It’s not long before she crosses Celia’s path and they recognize themselves in one another.

Abuse, murder, and psychological distress are Denfeld’s stomping grounds. Her first novel, The Enchanted, brought readers into the hearts and minds of death row prisoners. In The Child Finder, Denfeld not only introduced us to Naomi and the missing girl she sought, she opened a door into the haunted psyche of the child’s captor and showed us his humanity. 

In her own life, Denfeld is no stranger to trauma. She was raised in poverty, and her mother abused alcohol when she was young. Her stepfather was a registered predatory sex offender and a pimp, and her home became a revolving door of pedophiles. Like Celia, when Denfeld reported her own abuse she was not believed, and by the time she was fifteen she was sleeping on Portland’s park benches, with newspapers as a blanket. Later, she became the Chief Investigator at a public defender’s office in Portland, with a penchant for death row cases. She has adopted three children from foster care and fostered others, including teens. Her poetic writing has been praised by Margaret Atwood as “astonishing,” and she has been honored with literary awards including the Prix du Premier Roman Etranger, and listings from the American Library Association