Her mother called her “Junie,” but she was “Estelle” to nearly everyone else-a name that lived on even when she became known internationally as “Octavia,” represented in the middle initial she insisted be included in her name in all her publications. was unable to quite affirm or approve (or understand) her daughter’s choice to pursue writing as a career. Butler recalled with shame looking down on her mother’s work as a housecleaner when she was young, and hurting her mother badly with her scorn, something she deeply regretted as an adult: “I didn’t have to leave school when I was ten, I never missed a meal, always had a roof over my head, because my mother was willing to do demeaning work and accept humiliation.” Many of Butler’s most-beloved heroines would be women quite like her mother, women who struggled and compromised not because they were “frightened or timid or cowards” but who made the best of no-win situations because “they were heroes.” 4 Her mother’s support was crucial in other ways as well: somehow finding the money for her daughter’s first typewriter or her trip to the Clarion science fiction writers’ workshop, even as Octavia M. This respect was a hard-learned lesson, one that came too late. 3 She considered her mother (and her grandmother, and her great-grandmother) as inspirations for surviving the harsh world of poverty and racial prejudice into which they were thrust she spoke poignantly of the sense of inferiority that had always plagued her mother, who was pulled out of school at age ten to work.

Butler and her mother were close-being able to help her mother financially following her MacArthur award in 1995 was one of the high points of Butler’s life-though like many parents and children, they were able to become significantly closer only once they no longer lived under the same roof.

She was raised primarily by her mother and grandmother, in a household where money was often quite tight.

Octavia E. Butler by Gerry Canavan