Author, Michele Elizabeth, releases a new edition of her early memoir, White Butterfly: A True Story, available through www.micheleelizabeth.com, www.Amazon.com, and orderable through all bookstores.

In today’s society, debates abound on the proper way to treat mental illness. As for those who remain undiagnosed, a silent population suffers along with them. Michele Elizabeth exposes the plight of children raised by mentally ill parents by sharing her own traumatic experiences in White Butterfly: A True Story.

Broken into three parts, White Butterfly delivers a shocking portrayal of the server manipulation Elizabeth endured under her mother’s care, the destructive path down which she traveled as an adult and the ultimate liberation she gained in the end. Each section serves as a window into the soul of a woman who has struggled to heal.

Elizabeth immediately plunges readers into a smoky, seductive world – the foreign cities to which she escaped and the vices she submerged herself in to silence the troubled child within. From there, they travel back in time to experience a picture-perfect childhood, but only seen from the outside. Behind closed doors was something far more dangerous. Vying for her mother’s love, Elizabeth is instead subjected to a distorted plan of perfection in the name of God. A prayerful and pious child, Elizabeth absorbs her mother’s distorted religiosity, demonic ideologies and family conspiracies. As a teenager, the abuse continues in secret as she receives harrowing punishment for daring to explore her sexual identity. Elizabeth becomes a master of disguises, showing up for school as the pretty, popular and confident student, but going home to morph into her mother’s spiritual handmaiden. This duplicity only increases into her young adult life as she attends college.

At twenty-one, Elizabeth endures her own mental breakdown when she discovers the truth—her mother isn’t simply spiritually eccentric, but clinically insane. The very foundation her psyche is built upon crumbles, leaving behind a shaking young woman grappling with who she is underneath the years of delusion.

Elizabeth returns to London where she immerses herself in the dark nights of drugs and depression. Then a phone call regarding her mother’s declining health brings her back to America – and to old ghosts. Admitting her mother to a mental hospital measures a small step toward her freedom, but writing her story and purging the delusions from the past liberates Elizabeth completely.

Excruciatingly healing and beautifully written, White Butterfly offers a gripping account of a girl who suffered tremendously at the expense of mental illness, and the triumphant woman she grew to become.

Elizabeth now has her Masters in transpersonal psychology and specializes in stories about liberation. Butterfly is her debut memoir, originally published in 2004. Fembodyverse: An Inner-Stellar Adventure into Womanhood(fiction, 2012) is her second book about a seventeen-year-old girl who takes an inner-body adventure and discovers her inside-out value.

http://micheleelizabeth.com/
http://micheleelizabeth.com/books/white-butterfly/