Aimee Bender Issue #25

The Surreal Life: The acclaimed writer flips reality on its head with another collection of stellar short stories

By Margaret Wappler
Published: September 1st, 2005 | 1:33pm

On a perfectly sunny July day at the Farmer’s Market in Westwood, Los Angeles, I met novelist and short-story author Aimee Bender, a down-to-earth, born-and-raised Californian with brown eyes and a fresh laugh, as ripe as the piles of strawberries, peaches, and grapes that surrounded us. After getting kicked off a table by old ladies with heaving bags of fruit, we settled near an unobtrusive singer and guitarist. I got a free writing lesson from Bender, an instructor at the University of Southern California, who affably shared her seasoned tricks of the trade.

“Novels are tricky buggers,” she says, but you wouldn’t know it from reading the poetic, well-crafted An Invisible Sign of My Own. Her debut short-story collection, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, was selected as a New York Times Notable Book of 1998, and now she’s back with a second collection, Willful Creatures, delectable tales composed with equal parts shadow and light, and Bender’s trademark surrealism.

You have so much faith in your images and they’re so important to your work. How did you learn to trust them? When have you sensed an image leading you down the wrong path?
In some ways, I trust the images most out of everything. They come out of a really unconscious place and if they’re working, they give me some pleasure. If I try to fake an image, it’s really conscious and calculated. If you think, “What does a palm tree look like? Let me think about that,” I think that is when the mind gets more conservative. If [the mind] is left to free-associate, it will come up with something more interesting. Like my cousin said when she came to California — she thought the palm trees looked like fireworks. I thought that was great.

You believe thinking while writing clogs the works. How did you establish that for yourself?
It’s almost an act of humility, to know that your work is going to be more interesting the more you get out of the way. I have to give up something of my own ambition about how I want the thing to be. The better work happens when I’m just involved and not thinking about it. It’s hard for me to get to that place. I spend a lot of time just sitting around, waiting it out.

Do you favor short stories or novels?
I like them both, but the story form feels a little more natural. It’s my first instinct. But I like the challenge of having to be patient with a novel. It’s so hard but exciting to see what can emerge that’s unexpected.

When you start a short story, do you continue to the end, or do you have a whole bunch that you’re always working on?
I pretty much start a whole bunch. I definitely don’t continue to the end because often they are false starts or the story has something in it for a little bit, but then it’ll just bottom out. Sometimes I’ll return to a few paragraphs of a story a few years later and I’ll know where to take it in a way I didn’t at the time. My belief system is that if I sit down and just work on what I feel like working on, I’ll get better work done than if I force myself to finish something. If there’s a really sad story to work on and I’m not feeling that, then I just don’t work on it. And on a day where I’m feeling a little more quiet, then that’s exactly what I want to work on. It’s like getting dressed in the morning, like, “What do I want to wear today?” Instead of, “Well, I have to wear that damned checked thing because that’s what I said I would wear for the next month.” (laughs)

What has changed from Flammable Skirt to Willful Creatures?
It’s hard for me to tell. Some people say it’s darker, which is nice to hear but surprising. In some ways these stories — because a lot of them I worked on over several years — have more time beneath them. Some of that is affected by having written a novel in between. Something about my patience level got a little better. Also, with Flammable Skirt, I was in grad school and I had 10 intense opinions on every single story and that really guided me. This one was more me on my own.

Does it feel good to be on your own?
It feels good and scary. I have gotten feedback on many of them here and there, but yeah, it does feel good. But it also feels bizarre somehow. Unsettling. I feel a little less clear about Willful Creatures in that way, because it really helped to have Flammable Skirt reflected back at me.

I notice that in some of the stories, like in “Off,” there’s almost this violent need to make connections.
That character really wants to connect but is also really, really bad at it. For her, it’s all about connect, detach, flee, stalk. She’s got this sense of entitlement and it’s really fun and freeing to follow this character who just does what she wants, and is not really thinking about anyone else. She also has such loneliness that is totally unknown to her in a certain way. And that feels compelling.

With “The End of the Line,” I was really upset with the big man for being cruel to the little man, but I also felt empathy for him. He was so lonely and socially inept. Was it hard to write one character being so cruel to another?
That story took a long time because it was in little pieces and I would just dip in and write a little bit and then go write something else. In the moment of writing it, I found it painful. When I would look back and reread it, I would think, “Oh, God.” And it’s something I have a hard time with — cruelty — whether watching it in film or reading it. I also feel empathy for him, even though he’s kind of a terrifying character to me, too.

You like TV and I find that really refreshing because there are so many writers who say, “I don’t have a TV.” What do you like about TV, as a writer? Does it seep into your work?
Those writers always say it with that kind of knowing look, too. I go into TV fits. I have a soft spot for the teen dramas. I’m sure that totally affects my writing. I just watched the whole series of Freaks and Geeks. I loved it. I got sucked into reality TV for a while, but I’ve finally overdosed on it.

To me there’s this inherent surreal quality about TV, no matter what show or channel. And the first sentences of your stories often give me that weird TV feeling, too, because you’re very suddenly immersed in this world, with no apologies and no holding back.
Yes, there are similarities. I think there’s something surreal with my TV experience, too, because when I was a kid, we had a black-and-white TV way longer than anyone else. We’d watch The Wizard of Oz and she’d open the door to Oz and it would still be in black and white. And it would be so disappointing!

There’s something kind of great about that.
Yeah, it was great but then again I was so old by the time I got to have that moment. I was like, “Oh, this is why the music changes.” There was always this feeling of being left out. Also, I had all these TV rules. I would sneak it in the afternoons. In that way I really love TV as this illicit thing. Even though now I can watch as much or as little as I want, it always comes with a certain joy.