by Brian Beglin
Aimee Bender’s first collection of short stories, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (1998), was a New York Times Notable Book that blended fairy-tale archetypes with the emotional complexity of literary fiction. The anxiety-ridden math teacher of her follow-up novel, An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000), was more grounded in reality, but Bender’s playful, inventive sentences gave the world an air of the fantastic and cemented her status as a truly original stylist. Willful Creatures (2005), her second story collection, contained a number of widely anthologized stories. In her newest novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010), she gives nine-year-old Rose Edelstein the ability to taste other people’s emotions through the food they make.
Bender received her MFA from the University of California-Irvine. She lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Southern California. Brian Beglin conducted this interview over the phone and through e-mail in May and June, 2010. It originally appeared in the Fall 2010 issue of The Missouri Review.
***
BRIAN BEGLIN: I don’t know much about how you broke in. Did you go straight from undergrad to the MFA?
AIMEE BENDER: No, I took about four years off and taught elementary school. I taught language arts.
BEGLIN: And when you got to Irvine, how did people respond to your stuff in those workshops?
BENDER: It was a good workshop, an unusual workshop, where the range of style was really different. Alice Sebold was there, and Glen David Gold was there. We were picked by Judith Grossman, who has a very eclectic sensibility, and Geoffrey Wolff, who was just starting as head of the program. So there was this feeling of a new branch of the program beginning, and that was exciting. I think had it been at a different time it might have been harder for me, in some ways, to test out the waters. I didn’t expect that they would respond well to the stories that were less realistic, but they were incredibly supportive, and that was a huge gateway for me.
BEGLIN: What might have happened if the group had been less receptive?
BENDER: It’s hard to know, and I hope I would’ve found my way there eventually, but it helped to have a group of such distinct and inventive writers who enthusiastically pushed me toward the weirder fiction. I didn’t expect it, and it was one of those Aha! moments for me. Really, what they were doing was pointing out where the language and voice felt more real, more my own. I think that’s where a workshop can truly help—we can show the writer the work, in a way. We can say, “Look this is good, and that other part ain’t so good, even though it’s clear you think it’s brilliant.” I find that usually the parts I think are brilliant end up seeming strained to other people. Which is both humbling and liberating at the same time.
BEGLIN: How much of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt came from those workshops?
BENDER: About 90 percent.
BEGLIN: What was it like to then switch gears and start on a novel? Or had you been working on that alongside the stories?
BENDER: I started the novel my second year—and it was tough for a while. Workshopping novels is a tricky business. You have to give the writer a lot of space not to know what she’s doing, and sometimes the workshop asked me questions I couldn’t answer. I remember stomping around a UCI field at some point, just trying to shake off my feeling like I had to know what I was doing. I didn’t. With novels, that’s how it goes. A workshop can say, “We liked this; do more of this”—and that can be the most useful. Geoffrey Wolff was very good at helping point the way. As a teacher, I like to tell students to follow the language—to trust the parts that show up well on the page and cut the parts that just aren’t working. Maybe those parts will show up again as pages that work, but while they’re not working, they’re not working. That, in my view, is how you start to glimpse the shape and preoccupation of a novel, by looking at the pages that work.
BEGLIN: How much did your teaching background inform the classroom dynamics of An Invisible Sign of My Own?
BENDER: Well, I never brought an ax to the classroom. That was a good choice on my part. But some of the kids in the book were compilations of kids I had taught and whom I really missed as I wrote it. They’re in college now, a lot of those kids, which is hard for me to believe. Graduating college!
BEGLIN: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is actually set in LA, down to street names and colleges and supermarkets. That is different than a lot of your other work, where settings aren’t so specific.
BENDER: I wanted to ground it a little bit more. Invisible Sign was in a town, but there isn’t any direct magic in it. It’s more that there’s a strangeness to the world—everything in the physical world is possible in that book, but it doesn’t behave like our world. This book felt like it had a more actual magic in it, and as a counterbalance it made sense that it was more grounded. I know LA really well, and it was nice to be able to write about it. And I know LA food really well, so it was fun to celebrate that toward the end. There’s a lot of good food here.
BEGLIN: Yet Rose is drawn to eating processed food because it all gets put together by machines in factories, and it’s largely free of human touch. What do you think Michael Pollan would say about that choice?
BENDER: I love Michael Pollan. His writing style is so great— He has a wonderful book on gardening called Second Nature. I really like his thinking. But for the book it was important for me that it wasn’t just about championing the politics of locally grown food. I actually do believe there is a reason why processed foods are so appealing. There is something comforting, maybe in a dark way, but genuinely comforting about food that tastes alike and food that doesn’t really taste like that much. You are bringing to it a memory of other times eating it.
BEGLIN: The scene where Rose makes a class presentation on Doritos kind of makes this argument for the value of snack foods in a social sense. She says, “A Dorito asks nothing of you, which is a great gift. It only asks that you’re not there.”
BENDER: Right. Which is depressing, but also maybe there are moments where that is important.
BEGLIN: Comfort food, sort of.
BENDER: It’s a strange kind of comfort food, because we associate comfort food with something homemade or warm from the oven. But this is more generic comfort. And the thing is, I don’t feel like processed food is good. I planted tomatoes this year, I’m all for the locally grown. I just feel like our relationship to food is complicated.
BEGLIN: Like Water for Chocolate or even a lot of Carver stories use food to manifest desire or to bring people together. I like that you’ve taken something that’s traditionally very comforting and made it, in some places, menacing. Rose is haunted by this.
BENDER: I’m glad to hear it. Generally I think of food as something that brings people together. But there is something about taking in food that is not unlike taking in an unacknowledged feeling in a room. I think I’ve been circling around the idea for years, actually. It shows up in certain stories and unfinished pieces: that sense of taking in food and dealing with feelings that might not be addressed. What we take in, what we can’t pinpoint—that part is menacing to me. No one is aware of what they’re feeling every moment, all the time. You don’t know, and then you realize there’s something lurking under the surface that affects how you are in the world. For Rose, food is so suffused with this other stuff that she can’t really enjoy it. Food becomes no longer food. And then, of course you’re going to eat processed foods because it’s such a break. That felt important to me somehow, that the processed food would be the one place as a kid that she could find a little relief.
BEGLIN: You’re talking about timing, too: Rose is dealing with all of this when she’s nine.
BENDER: It’s about how much you can take in, and she gets a wallop too early. What do you do with that? I was just reading a New York Times article this morning about how babies have a moral center about what’s right and what’s wrong, and they can pick out the bad character in a puppet show when they’re one year old. This preverbal little person is responding to something but does not know what that is. I think everyone has some experience with that as a child. I was interested in that dilemma. And for Rose, it’s really extreme.
BEGLIN: Did you start this novel with something like that in mind?
BENDER: I never really start out with anything in mind. That’s the hard part. Embarking upon writing a novel for me is a lot of wandering around and then beginning to see what’s juicy or what feels like it has a book in it. I knew there was something important about this character and her relationship to food, but I also knew it was not the whole book. I hit about ninety pages, and I thought, Well, there’s more to tell, but I don’t know what it is yet. It took a while to figure out that next step. There were seeds, also, of the brother that were in place, and of the parents, but that took a little while. Before this book I was working for about five years on a book that was from the point of view of a teenage boy, a kind of wanting-to-be-scary teenage boy. The book didn’t work, and I ended up putting it aside. There was something really off in the narrative movement of it. It was depressing to stop working on it but also a relief. My editor, who had seen some of that book, thought I had in many ways taken it and written it again but from the sister’s perspective. The dynamics were different, but there were some of the same things. So I think it was hovering: the presence of Joseph, the brother, and his reaction to the world. He was rumbling, and then he kind of spun up. A couple of people have said to me that he’s actually the main character of the book, which is interesting.
BEGLIN: Your transitions between scene and summary are always fluid. When you’re writing, do you think of them as completely separate entities?
BENDER: I do think of them as separate, and I think of them as having different assets. I like both. I like summary-heavy books, lots of telling, because it can be very beautiful, and sometimes the language can go up a notch. I like scenes because you get more absorbed in them. It’s a lot about calibrating pace and figuring out what’s the moment that you want to open up and make into scene; often that might not be the most dramatic. It might be a moment after the most dramatic moment.
A review of Soderbergh after Erin Brokovich came out said something really helpful for me. The whole movie has been gearing toward this moment where Erin Brokovich reveals that the couple has won the money—this moment of You won! Everything was shot from afar, so you just see Julia Roberts and all the excitement and the hugs from a distance, and it downplays what could be a too-sentimental or predictable scene. He let us fill in our experience and then moved on. I just love that as a way of talking about fiction. What moments do we want to open up, and what moments might become cliché or predictable?
It’s liberating, because you realize you don’t have to go through the beats. With fiction, there’s nothing dictating where the drama is except your own drive to write. There’ve been liberating moments for me in writing this novel and Invisible Sign and realizing, well, I don’t want to write that scene. So then I won’t. There’s actually no reason that I have to, because it must mean there’s some other scene I’d rather write more, and that’s probably going to be more interesting.
BEGLIN: Switching gears to publishing: you’ve had stories in Harper’s and GQ and a lot of the big glossies, but you also still publish in Black Warrior Review, Cincinnati Review, Black Clock—excellent journals but also smaller, with a largely academic readership. Is that important to you?
BENDER: Yeah. They’re all doing interesting work. Basically, I think literary journals tend to be staffed by people who care about writing and are putting in extra time. It’s a different venue but certainly a worthwhile venue. And the shiny, glossy ones are becoming smaller and smaller in terms of how many there are. I’m delighted to be in them, but they get hard to get into, too. The world is changing.
BEGLIN: Lots of articles ask if a writer can still break in publishing in journals. It’s interesting. I don’t know. I get the sense that maybe people have been asking that for as long as journals have been around.
BENDER: That’s true. Online is actually very helpful for journals, because it cuts costs and creates space for collaboration with visual image in an interesting way. There’s a lot of good material online. Electric Literature is doing these cool flash animation trailers for stories, and that’s nice to see. So it is changing. I don’t know—I still think someone could break in that way. But it may be harder to know where to look?
BEGLIN: Along those lines, you’re a very recognizable writer now in terms of subject matter and style. Do you feel that, for lack of a better term, you have a brand?
BENDER: That’s sort of a strange compliment, to think I have a brand. I mean, if I have a brand, it’s a small, eclectic brand that I’m happy to say certain people respond to. But it’s not like I’m Sony Pictures or something, and they’re like, “You’ve got to turn out the same thing you did before because it’ll make millions!” I haven’t felt that kind of pressure. I definitely haven’t felt it externally. No one has ever said to me, “You need to write like this.” Internally, my general feeling about fiction is, you write what you can write on that given day. One day it might be realistic, and another day it might be magical. My own attraction to language is something that’s kind of out of my hands. It’s how it spits out onto the page. There is ultimately some freedom in that. And it’s humbling, too, because you start to see what your own preoccupations are over and over again, even when you don’t even necessarily know they’re preoccupying you.
BEGLIN: What has surprised you in that way?
BENDER: Math. The orderliness of numbers. A certain something about logic, the playing out of logic in a story or in a sentence. That’s not something I’m aware of, but it certainly guides how I form a paragraph. It’s not surprising to me that there’s so much about people connecting and not connecting, but that repeatedly comes up. Adolescence repeatedly comes up. People who are bullies. I wasn’t bullied, but I’m fascinated by bullies, by aggressors.
BEGLIN: It’s instant tension.
BENDER: And it’s complicated. What’s underneath what’s unlikable about a character continually interests me.
BEGLIN: So it’s fair to say you have a sentence-first approach to craft?
BENDER: I do.
BEGLIN: In that case, how do you deal with the structural challenges of a novel, or even a story? How do the sentences dictate the structure?
BENDER: They’re one and the same in a certain way. The challenge, I think, is staying with the sentences. If I stay with them, they will naturally move into narrative. There was a writer at Irvine, Jay Gummerman, who said that there’s structure in nature, which I always loved. If you can let it form itself, it will. There is something driving this book, or you wouldn’t be able to stand writing it. What is it? is the ultimate question. Right now I’m working on a long story, and there is something wrong in the structure of it. So it’s up to me to track down where the sentences start to go off and to see—okay, so in this paragraph something took a wrong turn, and I’m actually moving away from the push instead of moving toward it.
When I teach sometimes I’ll say to look at the sentences as symptom or guide. In the sentences you see where you have checked out of the story, or you can find out where the story actually is as opposed to the story you have built in your mind. It’s very rare that there’s a one-to-one match between what we think is going to be and then what actually is. I mean, that applies to everything.
BEGLIN: You primarily teach undergrads. Do they see writing as practical in the day-to-day sense, the same as studying chemistry or accounting?
BENDER: They know it’s not practical. They’re worried; they’re trying to figure out what they can tell their parents about the creative writing major. They’re also just figuring out who they are, and they’re being independent, and they’re trying out their voice. There are some really good writers there. Some of them take it seriously and write often, and some are just testing the waters and may not actually do any writing after their classes but hopefully will have a different kind of connection to reading.
BEGLIN: When I taught I sometimes had trouble conveying to non-English majors that there was value in writing, even if you’re not trying to get anything published.
BENDER: There’s huge value. The creative process is everywhere. It happens in cooking. It happens in pretty much all careers. I think it happens in connections with other people—how people dress and how they speak. But the value hinges on engagement. So when you try to write a story, even if you’re never going to publish it and even if it’s not your strong suit, if you’re really trying to make it yours, there’s something about that process that’s massively meaningful. You can ultimately apply that to very, very many parts of your life.
There’s a line from Dante—at some point I want to write an essay about it. It’s from the Robert Pinsky Dante translation. I’m going to butcher it here, but it’s something like, “God has found a grandchild in your art.” When I first read that, it didn’t make sense to me, but the footnote to the text said at that time it was believed that Nature was God’s child and Art was Nature’s child, making Art God’s grandchild. I just thought that was incredible. It’s a very beautiful way of relating art and nature. Maybe a person who is sitting down to write their first story is not creating a great work of art, but they’re creating something, and that something is participating in a larger process that, in my mind, is not totally different than a tree creating a leaf.
BEGLIN: Now that we’re on Dante, I have to ask: You’ve been memorizing poems?
BENDER: I have, that’s right. Only five so far. It’s like cooking, where I have very low expectations of myself. Cheston Knapp—he’s the former director of Tin House, I think he’s now managing editor of the magazine—wrote a great essay in which he talked about memorizing a Frost poem in high school and then berated himself for being pretentious. But I thought that sounded kind of fun. I have a few good friends who did the poetry program at Irvine when I was there for fiction. I loved hearing them talk about poetry, and I love how, at certain moments, they can bring out a line to illustrate their point. It feels extremely heartfelt and useful that they can access these words.
BEGLIN: Has it been useful for you?
BENDER: I’m loving it. It’s a really powerful action, more than I thought. I’m not so interested in reciting poems in public, but I just like the idea of having the words—having them, and being able to think about them on my own time, or when I’m driving. Now I have poems to recite when I’m driving! There are a couple of Wallace Stevens poems I memorized, and I really had a strong emotional response to the experience of memorizing them. It was not neutral at all. It wasn’t a rote activity. It was kind of disorienting. I felt a little disturbed, and then thrilled. It was strange—kind of great.
BEGLIN: I had a choir teacher who said you’re not really singing until you’re off the book.
BENDER: That makes sense, yeah. When you know a poem by heart, you can push it around and play with it and think about the pauses. And also think, Where does the emotion land? It feels like the poems reveal themselves to me in a different way once they’re in my head. Lines I might skip over because they seem quiet when read get really loud somehow.
BEGLIN: Have you ever written memoir?
BENDER: I’ve written a few personal essays for anthologies, and then one for the Washington Post. But mostly no. I find it a lot harder.
BEGLIN: Why is that?
BENDER: It’s harder to actually talk about things directly. Am I representing things in a fair enough way, or am I representing myself in a fair way? It’s the memoirist’s dilemma. With fiction, it’s still coming on some level from my experience but it’s been transformed enough times that I can be a little bit more direct emotionally about it.
BEGLIN: Does fear—the fear of people not understanding your work, or the fear of a taboo topic—ever inform your writing?
BENDER: Fear’s in there, yes. Not really of not being understood, though that does happen, and it can be hard—but maybe fear of what I may discover. What I love about writing, though, is that draft one is utterly private. It is truly mine alone, and if I don’t want to show it or even read it again, that’s fine. This is why I find actors so amazing, and terrifying—they do this in the moment in front of others. Writers write in caves, in a way. I also want to explore freely; I want to find stuff out, and I think the use of nonrealism helps with this—I can try to almost unknowingly suss out the scarier feelings in me in a storyline that doesn’t resemble my life.
BEGLIN: Is there a way you see yourself as a fiction writer that might be out of line with how other people see you or with what other people tell you?
BENDER: Sometimes. It depends. There’s this story in Flammable Skirt, “The Rememberer,” where the character’s boyfriend is going through reverse evolution. And I think of it as a really sad story about loss, and some people responded to it like: Ha ha ha, men are apes! That’s not what I intended at all, but they found that really funny. That’s going to happen. I would say more people connected to the part that was about loss. Or sometimes, the thing that’s overemphasized is quirky, or weird for the sake of weird—I’ll hear that sometimes, and it doesn’t match my experience of my own writing process, because I don’t feel like I’m ever trying to be weird.
BEGLIN: Do you ever have any interest in another medium? Writing movies or TV or comic books?
BENDER: Comic books would be pretty fun. I haven’t felt a draw to movies and TV because I grew up in LA and maybe I feel jaded about those things. Generally you have to change a lot when you put forward a script. I have many friends who’ve gone through millions of meetings and they just have to change and change. I used to have a fantasy of wanting to write a script so I could go into meetings and say, “No! No, I’m keeping that!” Of course, I would make no money and I’d never sell my script.
Brian Beglin’s fiction, interviews, and book reviews appear in The Cincinnati Review, Ninth Letter, Artful Dodge, the anthology Telling Stories, Talking Craft, and TheRumpus.net. He has an MFA from Purdue University and lives in Boulder, Colorado.
His website is www.brianbeglin.com. He can be contacted at brian [at] brianbeglin [dot] com.
