Aimee Bender is an American novelist and short story writer known for her surreal stories and characters. Her first book was The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, a collection of short stories. The book was chosen as a New York Times notable book of 1998, and spent seven weeks on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list. Other notable publications since are her novel An Invisible Sign of My Own, which was named as a Los Angeles Times pick of the year, a collection of short stories, Willful Creatures, and novel The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. Her most recent novel, The Butterfly Lampshade, was published in 2020. She lives and teaches in LA.

Natalie
Thanks so much for being here, Aimee.

Rebecca
I spent the whole afternoon rereading Willful Creatures, because I just wanted to.

Aimee
I’m so glad. Thanks for having me.

Rebecca
Yeah, I’m deep in your world.

Aimee
Good.

Rebecca
I forgot how much I love this story Off.

Aimee
That was fun to write.

Rebecca
Has that ever been optioned?

Aimee
Yes. In fact, there’s a podcast that just did — they’re doing enacted stories, where it’s basically a script of the story. Fictionz —they just did it. And they did Call My Name, which is sort of the prequel or the first one of that narrator, the rich gal out to mess with people. So fun to write from her point of view. It was a short film, also.

Rebecca
It was, yeah, cause it’s so perfect. I’ve always imagined that one as a short film and I was like, “Oh, I’m just going to ask her.” But it’s been a short film? I should try to find it.

Aimee
It has, but you know — could always be more. I’m happy to see her out and about in her dresses.

Rebecca
Yeah, they’re just so broken. Yeah, they’re just so broken.

Aimee
Yeah, totally.

Rebecca
So beautifully broken.

Natalie
Absolutely.

Aimee
When I was writing that story, and when I was writing Call My Name (which was in my first book), it was also this pleasure of a character who — for me, being someone who is often overly considerate and careful with my actions towards others, in mostly a good way but sometimes a debilitating way — this character who really messes with people freely, is not nice, is totally entitled, it was so fun. It was just a great joy to have her come in and step on people’s toes in all kinds of ways, literal and metaphorical.

Rebecca
“Oopsie.”

Aimee
Yeah, exactly. It’s good times.

Natalie
When I was introduced to Willful Creatures, which was my introduction to your work, I was just telling Rebecca that I was sick for a time and I had to take time off work. This was many years ago. I remember when my uncle sent me this book, and it was set up for me as the thing I could escape into when I was sick. This was supposed to be the book that he… it was like his sort of healing exercise that he was sending. He lived in Seattle. It was funny, I don’t even know how he came across you. He had been a high school teacher at the time, but I don’t know — he was just always a really thoughtful reader, and your work was on his mind for me, and it was so interesting how it became something that then I went on and taught so many times.

Aimee
I love that.

Natalie
So I can’t even tell you how many times I have taught two specific stories: Fruit and Words — I used to teach Off, and then I moved away from Off because I realized that the students were really resonating with these very two specific ones: Fruit and Words and Ironhead. So I have a question for you that is actually coming from my students. They are 17 and 18, these are grade 12 students who are just heading off into university, and really just figuring themselves out in the world. They wanted to know if you were inspired by magic realism. So even though other people are determining you as anti-realism, I’ve read that by somebody — but what would you say about that term magic realism?

Aimee
Well first, I just want to say it makes me just so happy that you teach my stories, so thank you. It’s the best thing to hear, because that’s what you want — is the work to go into the world and find different and new readers, and be talked about. So it’s just so moving and nice. Thank you. I come from a family of many teachers. My mom taught modern dance for years — there’s just books around of the teaching of various things. So it’s just really fun to imagine, and there’s all kinds of terms and they all come with different histories, and you get magic realism extending back into Latin America, and these big sweeping epics, and then surrealism going back to France, and a Freudian response, and anti-realism I actually don’t really know. They’re all playing with this idea of realism, but I guess I enjoy all the terms, and I don’t pick any for myself. I feel like it’s that kind of game between reader and writer. This idea that it’s all a fallacy, because none of it’s realism and all of it’s realism, and what is realism anyway? We’re just trying to capture something, and we know from our lives that we sometimes feel very connected to the grounded reality of the moment, and we sometimes really don’t, and for all kinds of reasons: for moments of great joy, where things feel tinged with a glow that is above and beyond a kind of reality that we know, and of times of great anxiety, where things distort completely, and at times of sadness, where time changes. So it’s just that I feel like we know as humans, we process the world in a whole variety of ways. So I feel like part of the job of art of all kinds is to give us as many reflections of that experience as it can. So I think that’s just my goal as a writer, to feel like I don’t want to feel limited by any set notion of what can be done on the page. I just want to try to capture something as true as I can to experience.

Natalie
To grow from that, a student and I were just working on his term essay, and he really wanted to explore how mundane details in storytelling open up space for a reader to understand something magical or divine hidden in those details. Just wanting to know if you relate to that student’s thinking, if that resonates with you?

Aimee
Yeah, I love that question. Because I think what I love about that question so much is it’s aligning the mundane and the magical, which you often think as opposite — that something tinged with wonder is going to be extraordinary and not ordinary. Instead, that the ordinary and extraordinary are about how we notice things and see things. So yes, I like to quote Flannery O’Connor a lot, because I think she has a lot of great wisdom about writing, and hers is that you see the world more and more in something, the longer that you look at it. In the same way that the ordinariness, if put under a close enough gaze and a careful enough look will start to reveal things, in the same way that those children’s stories — you know, it’s The Borrowers and they’re living in a household, and they’re finding a button, and they’re using the ordinary button that we live with, when taken imaginatively, becomes for them like a kitchen table, and that our minds are so happy making sense of that. But it’s because of the ordinariness of the button that we get to make that leap.

So I think the student is really right. It also dignifies the mundane, which I really like — that the mundane gets such a bad rap. Of course we’re all flooded in it all the time, but the perception of the mundane is the thing, and so if we can attend to our perceptions and dignify them, we can find a lot in there. My most recent book came out in 2020, and the character just stares at a lot of things. It’s a slow-paced book in that there’s just a lot of time spent on the small, but I think I really felt like that was so important to me — that it was kind of a value system baked into the book.

Rebecca
It’s so weird — I’m thinking of that story we were just talking about off the top, in Off, that she would end up in a closet, with all these coats on her. So it’s both interestingly mundane, but super weird. You do that really well — that it’s just a woman with coats, but now she’s taken them all into the closet and covered herself with them, and it’s now this really strange situation. I just feel like your mind is so interesting. It’s like you follow the mundane to a strange place.

Aimee
Right, or maybe it could be argued that there’s always the strange in the mundane. It’s always there, it’s just that we stop looking at it, and so we might miss it. But there is something sort of cozy and den-like about a room that is full of people’s coats. You know, a closet full of coats, or the room at a party where people leave their coats is a sort of given, even in Los Angeles — you know, a certain winter holiday party. And so then it felt like — a lot of what I’ll do with teaching is just to be like, “Look around and see the story that you’ve created.” So she’s at a party, there’s going to be that space, and when this character who’s ultimately so needy of care, and so broken, as you said, wouldn’t she want to be in a kind of nest? And that nest fails her, too — you know, everyone is coming and taking her nest away. So I think it’s like if you keep staying in the space that you’ve created, the weirdness will naturally emerge. It’s just there, it’s not like there’s any situation that doesn’t have a strangeness inside it. It’s always there. Sometimes it’s bad and sort of frightening, and sometimes it’s wondrous and beautiful. I don’t know the meaning, the word root of ‘mundane,’ but now I’m curious about it — like what’s that word built of? What is it?

Rebecca
So in The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake — so this idea of this woman who can taste the emotions of the food she’s eating, how did that idea come to you?

Aimee
It’s so funny, just on the sister thing — I have two sisters that I’m very close to, they both write. One writes fiction, published widely. The other one, she’s a psychiatrist and she wrote this book about being a therapist. I totally recommend having them on at some point, if you want to extend the Bender sisters.

Rebecca
Yeah!

Aimee
They’re fantastic. One of them just found bees in her house — so there’s all these texts I’m having to like… because they’re just having a whole beat that I’m ignoring them, but it’s just because I have to be on my phone because we couldn’t figure it out.

Rebecca
And she’s probably like, “Where are you? I need you right now. I have bees!”

Aimee
They’re having a whole — anyways. But I just love that you had the intro to your podcast about sisterhood and reframing, right, because I relate to that very much. With Lemon Cake, I think I’m always interested in the emotional communications that are less visible. That’s just something that’s always been interesting to me, and maybe as a child, not able to articulate it — and trying to articulate it now, what are the things we pick up from each other — good and bad, and in the middle? And so that ultimately is like the deeper interest. But then I think: I love food, I love food writing, and I have a really close friend who talks a lot about digestion — digesting feelings, or metabolizing feelings. Those are just the verbs that she uses very freely. And so I think she probably made the link for me, where then suddenly I felt like this idea of making the emotional world similar to the gastrointestinal world, so to merge those two.

Basically what it did — and this is how I think about any magical storytelling (back to the magical realism question) — is that it gave me as a writer something really tangible to work with, that then held within it something intangible. So the emotional life could be talked about through the cake, and through the sandwich, and through the vending machines. It could be talked about through all these, “Who cooked it?” and who she’s feeling beneath it, but I could express it through the roast beef sandwich. That gave me something to write about, because just to speak of the emotional life without a concrete wrapping can be really hard to capture in language, right — and capture at all, because I think we feel it, but it’s really ineffable.

So to that, I feel like often the role of magic for me is it’s a way to ground something that otherwise feels really ungrounded. With the Ironhead story, thinking about families and thinking about characters that are different inside families, but just giving them different heads, and then just playing out the difference of the head and how they interact with each other and the love that they share, and also the differences that they feel. But me never having to say that because I’ve just concretized it immediately. And I’m not doing that intentionally, but I think in the after I can look at it and see how I feel like I made my job easier by going towards this tangible thing I can talk about.

Rebecca
And then his head is so heavy. Did that metaphor just emerge out of that, that he can’t hold his head up, and did you even know you were creating that metaphor?

Aimee
No, I didn’t know. I think it was just a visual image that I felt drawn to, and then I could learn about it. It was the same as the room with the coats — to then be like, “Well, what would it be like to have a head that’s an iron? That would be really heavy, and especially so different — just so qualitatively different than pumpkins.” Everything is different, and so the heaviness and the alienation — even though they adore him, you know? I wanted that to be important too.

Natalie
I should send you some of what’s coming in. You have so many papers to read on your own time of your own students, but oh my goodness, watching these 17-year-olds, it makes me feel emotional thinking about the way that they do that work. It’s so beautiful. It’s just…

Aimee
Yeah. Oh, it’s amazing. I mean, it’s wonderful as a teacher for you to be so connected to their work, and it makes me so happy to think of them.

Natalie
I don’t know, there are so many young people who suffer, and for them to see themselves in these hilarious characters — really if you think about it, right, but yet are just so human… oh my goodness, anyways. Ok, in a recent piece for Lit Hub, you quoted Iris Murdoch and said that “Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea,” and then you go on and write for yourself that the page is all you get, and, “The page is what makes the soup of the mind into something tangible. If there is no book in my mind, then the only way I can find a book is by writing it.” Can you talk about that process for you? Because a lot of my students really do struggle with, “Well, I don’t have the idea. How do I even start?”

Aimee
You know, it’s so interesting to me, because you really hear just how people make things all different ways. You’ll hear people will say, “I do have a thing in my mind,” and then try to just get closer and closer to the thing that I made. But I love that Iris Murdoch quote, because of this idea that it’s destined to fail, and the relief in that. If the idea is destined to fail, then you’ll make something else, and if every book is that failure and it becomes something else. So if there can be some letting go of the expectation of the thing that you’ve consciously imagined into letting space for what might be outside of your awareness for cooking inside you and to try to explore. I think it’s just: how do we explore? And what is the value of exploring and not knowing? You can sit down to a blank page and feel very, very intimidated, but you can sit down to a page and just have someone give you the wispiest writing prompt. You know, “Start a sentence with the word ‘wisp,’” and people will go. We need so little to tap into that resource. I think it’s really important too for people that feel that they don’t have an obvious story to tell, because there are people that have very clear stories in their lives, and there are many people who don’t know, and they’re there anyway. That’s the thing, is that I feel like the stories are absolutely there, they just need a little coaxing. They just need a little help being found. I think the way that I tend to work best is letting it happen in front of me, as I’m going — and most of the time, that’s not working, but when it works, it’s like this great pleasure of invention. But I need that push in some way or another. So I can think of an image that’s intriguing to me, or I’m sitting down and I’m super bored, so I make something up, and all these things emerge that way.

So I think just the liberation of letting go of that book in the mind, or that idea in the mind, or that thing that’s not showing up on the page anything like what you thought it would be, and to know that that’s actually maybe just the way of life. I think it’s true for life, too. I think you had mentioned something about that — like, how does it expand? You know, in my own life, I can think of my own expectations for what something would be like. I mean, people talk about this all the time, right? They’re like, “I didn’t expect my life would look like this.” There’s this John Cage quote I have in my office, it’s something like, “If we can just let go of our desires for things to be a particular way,” — this is paraphrasing, — “Then we get to experience this amazing surprise and wonder in our lives.” If we’re not seizing onto, like, “But it had to be this way,” or, “I wanted this kind of relationship,” “It had to be this particular fantasy of whatever.” If the fantasy can get burst, then there’s something else to discover. So I feel like it becomes a way that writing is like a lab for life. It’s not like it’s easy, but I do feel like whenever I can lean into that, things feel much more open and interesting.

Rebecca
So do you go back and outline, then? Do you do that process, or are you kind of just anti-outlining altogether — it doesn’t work for your process?

Aimee
Yeah, it just doesn’t work for the way that my mind is. I think there are people that can do a kind of hybrid, but whenever I’ve tried, I think what happens is the excitement that happens in the outlining is spent in the outlining, and then when I sit down to try to fill it in, I’m no longer interested. Just that the piece of work is the outline — and that’s now done. I think there are people that are like, “I then use the outline as a skeleton, and then I go on and fill it in.” But I’m like, “No, it has to be like a sentence-by-sentence movement that is pushing forward, and then that’s the thing that I will follow.” But like I said, most of the things I’m writing, I’m bored of. I have so many files that fizzle, and so then it’s such a delight and relief when something keeps going.

Rebecca
Where you’re like, “This is capturing me for longer, longer.”

Aimee
Exactly. Exactly. Most things, I’m just like, “Yuck, yuck, again yuck. Boring, boring, boring.” You know, I just don’t like any of it. I have to sit here a little longer, because that’s my rule. Extremely bored.

Rebecca
Why — what’s your rule? That you sit there for…?

Aimee
My rule is just to sit for a certain amount of time. I have to sit there for that certain amount of time — so I’ve committed to a time.

Rebecca
And does it change? Based on the time of year, or…?

Aimee
Usually not. But now I have kids, so it changes a little bit more than it used to. Generally like an hour and a half these days.

Rebecca
That you sit.

Aimee
Yeah.

Rebecca
And like, your sisters won’t call you during that time? Do they know when you’re…?

Aimee
They might, but I can’t pick up.

Rebecca
Ok.

Aimee
Yeah. And it’s hard. My attention has changed with just the world of phones. It’s harder not to take a break, do a little scroll. Sometimes I totally will, but it’s not helpful when I do. Definitely more helpful when I can kind of writhe uncomfortably and just feel like, “I don’t want to be here.” And then usually I get through that, and then I’m happily writing.

Rebecca
But the goal isn’t to write a thousand words, it’s to sit with yourself with the page for that time.

Aimee
Yeah, I think word count is also really good, depending if… you kind of know your own quirky brain, right? So some people, word count is really helpful. Some people don’t want to work on a schedule — that’s good, too. But for me, it’s totally time, because I want to feel like I have worked if I get nothing done. I feel like I could write a thousand words, but I don’t know — I just will never want to read most of them. It’s more about waiting out the discomfort, and I think that’s time-related for me.

Natalie
I think the next one’s yours, Bec.

Rebecca
Oh, but I’m so involved.

Natalie
Bec is like right in there.

Rebecca
I just want to hear more about this.

Aimee
I’m so glad.

Rebecca
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Are you inspired through your teaching, inspired by your students? Or where do you turn for inspiration, if not them?

Aimee
I love teaching, and it feels like a totally different action, but I love it. I love my students, I love seeing their work. I teach undergrads and grads and they’re all doing really exciting stuff, and I feel like they keep me hooked into the world. But it’s just so different. Even though we’re talking about writing, it’s like volleyball or something. You know, it’s just a very different action than sitting alone and writing. In terms of where inspiration comes from, I mean, that’s the nice thing about being a writer, right? It’s everything. So I think it’s anything — but I was thinking about this recently. It’s just you have to be engaging with something on more than a surface level, but it really can be anything. I think when something starts to deepen, then it becomes material. It starts to sink into the self in some way and become useful. There’s a lot of surface that we’re all wrestling with, and even with the dire state of so much of the news, a lot of that feels like surface too. I feel like I keep trying to figure how to engage more deeply, so that I don’t just feel kind of shell-shocked by things — and I don’t know. I think make some choice and try to do something that is more connected — for me, more connected to what I can offer in some way. Then all of that seeps in. If I spend time potting a plan, then is it likely that I’ll write about a plant in three months? Probably. I feel like a lot of plants show up in my writing, and that’s totally incidental, but I do pay attention to plants. But also, I have two twins and they’re a huge part of my life, but I don’t really want to write that much about kids because I feel like… I don’t know, it’s too much in my daily life. Right now, at least, it’s too absorbing in the moment to find its way into the fiction — or it will find its way in other ways.

Natalie
So then, is writing at some level like a form of therapy? Would you go that far, in terms of your own work? Because you’re processing things, is what I’m hearing you say, that have maybe been in you for a bit. Is that a way of writing it out of your body?

Aimee
It’s a great question, because I don’t have an easy answer for it. I don’t think it’s a form of therapy, but I think it’s a form of engagement. I think engagement of all kinds is good. I think when we engage with things, when we deeply move through a frustrating process that is both joyful and awful, the way most processes are, then I think that does change a person and supply some kind of meaning. There’s this great Zadie Smith essay about, like, is writing just something to do? Is it the same as making banana bread? And she’s like, “Maybe it is, but maybe that’s fine.”

Rebecca
I know! I love that one.

Aimee
I’ve been thinking about it so much, because there was something so accepting in the essay. She was like, “Ok,” and I feel like that — like, well, maybe it is something to do, but the act of doing it is not static. It does affect change upon me. I don’t know if it’s a therapeutic change, necessarily, because I think it is a different process than actually talking to another person and working through something, but I think it shows you what a process can do, which then makes you open to other processes in life. Because of that, I feel like that’s a huge part of my teaching — to feel like it doesn’t matter if people publish, because I think there is great value in the act of writing on its own, which I do really believe.

Rebecca
Do you hang out or get inspired by a lot of other artists? I was thinking about how Ocean Vuong, I just read recently that he doesn’t want to hang out with artists. He doesn’t like the energy.

Aimee
AWP is this Associated Writing Program event, which is once a year, and there’s all kinds of booths and programs. When I have gone to it, it’s really fun for like half a day, and then it’s like, “Get me around people that do anything else.” You know, there’s just a feeling of, like, we’re all too occupied with it. But at the same time, I used to do the Tin House writer’s workshop, and that actually was really wonderful. So maybe it’s just if there’s like a teaching component, maybe that’s helpful, because that diversifies the thinking. I don’t know. I know a lot of therapists, so I feel like psychological talk is a big part of the way that I think about things in terms of friends, spouse, family members. So I feel like that’s often another way to process how people tick, and why — but through a different lens. I also like talking to artists that are not writers, and hearing how they utilize different tools to arrive at some similar things. I think again, it just goes to people that are connected to what they’re doing. That’s always interesting. There’s definitely some jobs I don’t understand at all — I mean, going back to teaching, right? It’s always plenty of teachers I know, and that always feels really compelling to me as well.

Natalie
And then there’s some really annoying teachers who you don’t want to hang out with. So I mean, it’s always the same.

Aimee
It’s always. I think any group, there’s always that wonderful kind of shared interest — any group of career, there’s shared interests, and then there’s the, like, “Ok, I need someone who’s woodworking. I desperately need to talk to a blacksmith.”

Rebecca
Just to know. Watch the fire.

Aimee
Yes, exactly. Just to remove myself from the verbal. The endless verbal.

Natalie
“The endless verbal,” I love that. That’s our title, Bec. The endless verbal.

Aimee
I really love that.

Rebecca
That’s so good.

Natalie
That’s so perfect. We always search. That’s what we do, we search every episode as we’re participating in it — but in the back of our mind is, “What’s our title?” and then something emerges. Bec, we have two minutes and 49 seconds. Do we do the speed round just for fun? Do we just go? There’s no thinking, just answers. Ready? One, two, three. What’s the last new skill you’ve learned?

Aimee
Oh my God. Oh, I’m so bad at these. I’m such a slow thinker. I learned how to raise the handlebar on a scooter.

Natalie
That’s a big deal. That’s a big one. Becca, your turn.

Rebecca
What’s a common myth or something people misunderstand about your profession?

Aimee
Oh, I mean, there’s tons, but somehow that the actual writing is not the centre of it — it’s something about the kind of public self, or the published thing, as opposed to it being really about doing it.

Natalie
What’s the most fun thing you did today?

Aimee
This!

Natalie
Yeah!

Rebecca
How would your sisters describe you? In three words.

Aimee
How would they describe me? Probably kind of mellow, and loving, and creative.

Natalie
Ok, what do you need to be creative?

Aimee
You need to get out of the way. So you need to get some things in place that will help you get out of your own way — and that’s totally possible. We all get in our own way.

Natalie
Totally.

Rebecca
What’s for dinner tonight? Last one.

Aimee
Oh, it might be pizza. It might be frozen pizza. My kids are home from school, there’s COVID, blah.

Rebecca
That’s going to be easy.

Aimee
Yeah, it’s going to be an easy dinner.

Natalie
This has been such a life-giving conversation for me, so thank you so much for doing this time with us.

Rebecca
Oh yeah.

Aimee
Thank you both. Oh, I love your questions and the whole feel of it. So thank you so much for having me.

Rebecca
I’m going to connect about your sisters.

Aimee
Please do. Karen is a fiction writer and she’s amazing, and Suzanne has a new book about being a therapist and they’re both wonderful, and they would be great.

Natalie
A part two.

Aimee
Part two and three.

Natalie
Thank you, Aimee.

Aimee
All right. Take care.

Natalie
Take good care.

Aimee
Thank you so much.

Natalie
Thank you.