The Butter House
Alum - Creative Writing at The New School
Conium Press, 2023
“With precise and lush details, Gerard captures a sense of life’s fragility amid new possibilities. The author’s fans are in for a treat.”
—Publishers Weekly
“The Butter House is like a lithe and seductive feline, sinking its uncut claws into you. Sarah Gerard’s prose is quiet and contemplative and then chaotic in bursts, also not unlike a cat. The Butter House incisively considers the simultaneous care and cruelty of pet ownership, and Gerard is masterful in writing into all the nooks and crannies of a relationship. It’s the tale cat people deserve.”
—Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya, author of Helen House
The Butter House follows a woman who moves from a New York apartment to a Florida bungalow with her boyfriend. As she adapts to her new surroundings, the narrator navigates contradictory landscapes of love and possession, nature and built-environment, empathy and sympathy. She undergoes the arduous task of introducing two cats to the house and each other, while also becoming a surrogate caretaker for the neighborhood’s feral cat colony. She grows a garden. She interrogates what it means to care for someone or something. Laced within these tender scenes, The Butter House chooses deliberate moments to scratch and bite with the ferocity of a territorial alley cat.