Octavia E. Butler

As a child in Pasadena, Octavia Butler was so shy that she often watched other children rather than joining them. She was taller than her classmates, read slowly, and noticed the smirks and assumptions that followed. “I believed I was ugly, helpless and socially hopeless,” she later said. Dyslexia made schoolwork slower. Stories gave her somewhere else to go.

Her father died when she was three. Her mother, Octavia Margaret, had left school at ten and supported the family by cleaning other people’s houses. She wanted a different education for her only child. So she carried home whatever books her employers or their children threw away: yellowed books, scribbled-on books, books with spills or missing covers. If it could be read, it came home.

Butler became a regular at the Pasadena public library and filled a large pink notebook with stories. When she asked for a typewriter, her mother bought a portable Remington on an installment plan—ten dollars a month. It was a serious tool for a child whose ability was still easy to miss. At thirteen, when an aunt warned that Black people could not become writers, Butler was already typing and sending out her work.

Her mother could not make the shyness disappear or make school easy. She kept books within reach, paid for the machine month after month, and made sure her daughter could attend school. Butler sometimes accompanied her to work and felt ashamed when they had to enter through back doors. Later, she saw what those hours had paid for: food, shelter, school, and room to write.

The Remington did not lead quickly to a career. Butler collected rejection slips for years and wrote before dawn while working jobs that paid the rent. She eventually published twelve novels and became the first science-fiction writer to receive a MacArthur fellowship. The child who felt socially hopeless did not have to become socially effortless first. Her mother kept putting words and tools within reach long before success offered any proof.