Aimee Bender’s coming out with a new book. Bender changed a lot of lives in my generation of writers when she came out with her first book of short stories, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, in 1998. She was writing against a trend of increasing “realism” in the contemporary short story—those type of short stories favored by MFA programs in which physical reality gets nearly photocopied onto the page. Bender made a lot of us feel immediately more free when she came out with a book of stories that felt like a book of fairytales: short, quirky parables in which characters didn’t have names, they did odd things, and their stories pivoted on misplaced details. In one story, a man “de-evolved” by “growing” from an ape to a sea turtle to a salamander. In another, a man returned from war without his lips. Aimee seemed able to say anything. And say it simply. And she made writing feel fun.
In June, she’s coming out with a new novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, in which a girl discovers that she can taste other people's emotions when she eats their food. Her mom’s yellow birthday cake tastes just like her mom’s sadness. Other people’s food gets her to feel what they feel.
Sounds Bender-esque: cake, sadness, and a parable feel. As I said, she was one of the first contemporary writers who made me feel that I didn’t have to write fiction that fit a mold but could write fiction that expressed whatever was unique about my imagination.
I recently sent her a few questions about self-love, etc., and here’s what she had to say:
Ilana Simons: When I think of your writing or imagine your writing process, I imagine the words “be kind to yourself.” Does the phrase “being kind to yourself” mean much to you, in the way you get yourself to put bold words on paper?
Aimee Bender: Kindness seems like a good route to take, yes. Though it's funny—early on, being kind to myself while writing meant feeling free to write “kill, kill, kill” in a small poem or something as a way into taking off the gloves with the work itself. I wanted to feel free to write things I might find scary, and I thought it was funny to write “kill, kill, kill,” and that was so relieving to me. So there's gentleness, for me, in writing about violence. Weirdly, if I sat down and said, I want to be kind to myself, I might feel like I had to be nice in my stories and feel inhibited. So, yes, being kind—but how to define true kindness?
I think part of the love aspect is to get that what you truly offer the world is your own strangeness/particularity. I've heard the wonderful writer Steve Elliott talk beautifully about this—what he says is we can offer our view of the world through our particular filter and that is the best thing we can offer. I really agree. So there is love there because it's valuing what you have to say and trying to figure out how and what it is you feel like saying. And, one more thing: it's trusting that there's depth in whatever you are drawn to, even if it seems small or negligible at first; if you feel like writing one day about a sock, to trust that there's depth in that sock, to look to Lydia Davis's beautiful story "The Sock," or Deborah Eisenberg's story ["The Girl Who Left Her Sock on the Floor”], to know that in the small comes the large, later.
IS: What do you do to unwind?
AB: I like to cook, actually. This week I made shredded beef for tacos, came out pretty good. And a bean/barley/asparagus stew, recipe given to me by my friend Christine who's an amazing cook—it's super healthy and I feel very virtuous eating it.
IS: When is writing most painful for you, and what do you do about it?
AB: Right now I'm in the new stage, the generating stage, where I don't know what to work on and I have about twenty just started things that aren't really moving along. It is a drag! But I just try to wait it out. To sit through restlessness as best I can. Eventually something moves.
Ilana says, “It does.”
Ilana Simons is a therapist, literature professor, and author of A Life of One's Own: A Guide to Better Living through the Work and Wisdom of Virginia Woolf. Visit her website here.
