How The Knife and the Butterfly was inspired by the students I never got to teach
Ashley Hope Perez
I’ve talked a lot about how I wrote my first novel, What Can’t Wait, because my high school students in Houston challenged me to write about their experiences, to show how hard it could be to meet their obligations at home and follow their dreams. By contrast, The Knife and the Butterfly is mostly about the experiences of the teens I never got to meet, the ones who slipped through the cracks in the system or dropped out of school like the protagonist, Azael.
This is not just a hypothetical situation. In Houston schools, the de facto dropout rate is an astonishing 50%. These dropouts get classified in lots of creative ways, but the reality is, out of a starting freshman class of about 1550 at the high school where I taught—which was typical—only around 800 graduated. Since I always taught seniors, this means that there were tons of kids who disappeared from school before they got to my class.
So I still drew on my experiences, but school actually plays a very small part in Azael and Lexi’s lives. In The Knife and the Butterfly, I had a different set of issues to contend with that pushed me well beyond the world I knew. The biggest instance of this was researching MS-13 in Houston. I wanted to show the complex role it played in Azael’s life without glorifying gangs—or implying that every gang member is a ruthless animal.
