Aimee Bender: Biography

Aimee Bender is the author of four books: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (1998) which was a New York Times Notable Book, An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000) which was an L. A. Times pick of the year, Willful Creatures (2005) which was nominated by the Believer as one of the best books of the year, and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010) which recently won the SCIBA award for best fiction, and an Alex Award.

Her short fiction has been published in Granta, GQ, Harper’s, Tin House, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, and many more places, as well as heard on PRI’s This American Life and Selected Shorts. She has received two Pushcart prizes, and was nominated for the TipTree award in 2005, and the Shirley Jackson short story award in 2010. Her fiction has been translated into sixteen languages.

She lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches creative writing at USC.

See what Google is saying about her these days.

Aimee Bender: Something Is Shifting

September 21, 2010

How has Aimee’s approach to storytelling evolved from book to book?

At what point in the three-and-a-half years that she worked on The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake did she feel like she understood what she was writing?

Do you remember that part of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with the square candies that suddenly look round? [click to comment]

Aimee Bender Napped in the Reading Preserve

August 9, 2010

What’s a reading preserve, you ask? No, it’s not a story cooked with sugar and then canned to protect against fermentation (though in fact that sounds like a detail you might find in one of Aimee Bender’s stories).

Five years ago, in an interview, I asked Aimee where she takes friends who visit L.A. She told me about The Museum of Jurassic Technology. “They have this wonderful, very dark exhibit of trailer parks in America,” she said, “little dioramas of trailer parks with chirping crickets. It’s beautiful! They have letters to the observatory and bats that fly through walls.”

And she raved, “It’s great for writers, because it’s half real and half not, and no one knows what’s what.”

Last winter, I finally saw the place, thanks to the hospitality of a good friend at Vroman’s Bookstore. In the context of Bender’s latest novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, it makes perfect sense. A character who can taste the feelings of the people who make her food? Lemon Cake could generate an exhibit unto itself. [click to comment]

Aimee Bender: Three Books that Blew Her Mind

August 1, 2010

Says Bender: “Books should help you be a person, right? That’s what a book, I think, hopefully, ideally could do. All these books in some way, in some underground way, are guides.”

Subscribe to ReadRollShow using the form on the right and you could win a signed first edition of Aimee’s new novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake! [click to comment]

Aimee Bender: The Kingdom Where Everybody Lived Forever

July 12, 2010

Six weeks ago, emailing with Aimee about her upcoming visit to Portland, I told her about a project that my company had taken on. Pulitzer Prize winner Jonathan Weiner would be publishing a new book, Long for this World, about scientists working “to cure the disease of aging”—in short, to extend the human life span indefinitely by reprogramming our cells into a state of permanent regeneration.

In coordination with Weiner and his publisher, Ecco, we’d be nurturing conversations about the subject—not about the book, specifically, but the overarching idea of immortality. Should scientists try to cure aging? What might the world look like if they succeed?

I asked Aimee whether she’d contribute her thoughts, or maybe a favorite literary passage or song lyric on the subject. She liked the idea of a song lyric best.

And then, in preparation for this interview, I went back to her first novel, An Invisible Sign of My Own. Since first reading it ten years ago, rarely has more than a month or two passed when I haven’t thought about Mr. Jones, the narrator’s old math teacher. Mr. Jones wears a wax number around his neck every day to express—literally, to rate—his mood. Surely I’ve told dozens of people about his rating system.

But I’d completely forgotten about the book’s prologue.

“So,” it begins. “There was this kingdom once where everybody lived forever. They’d discovered the secret of eternal life, and because of that, there were no cemeteries, no hospitals, no funeral parlors, no books in the bookstore about death and grieving. Instead, the bookstore was full of pamphlets about how to be a righteous citizen without fear of an afterlife.”

Oddly, Aimee hadn’t connected the passage to the immortality project, either. In this video, she reads the prologue in its entirety.

If you haven’t read An Invisible Sign of My Own, run, don’t walk, to your local bookstore right now. (Unless of course you’re reading this late at night. Or naked. In either case, stay right where you are.) A decade after publication, it remains one of my favorite contemporary novels. But don’t trust me; read the reviews. Or read the start of the first chapter (as opposed to the prologue). [click to comment]