photo, courtesy USC

Aimee Bender is fascinated by amputation and deformity. Her fictional stories, collected in The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (Doubleday, 1998), and novel, An Invisible Sign of My Own (Doubleday, 2000), repeatedly describe severed appendages, physical abnormalities, and instances of self-mutilation. However, rather than portraying such topics as objects of disgust and repulsion, Bender gives her readers a sense of normalizing distance. In the allegorical worlds of Bender's stories, amputation and abnormality are not only assumed and taken for granted, but are embraced as modes of accessing the emotional scars of her characters. Writing outside the confines of physical reality enables Bender to use abnormality as a metaphor for the damaged parts of the modern human psyche, and of the modern female psyche in particular.

It is not difficult to trace the influences of such magic realist writers as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Angela Carter in Bender's writing, and indeed, Bender counts both these authors as inspirations for her work. Bender explains that the element of fantasy in her work enables her to reveal more about human nature than if she were to write in a strictly literal sense. "Through metaphor, I feel freer to attack the various feelings that come up in a situation," says Bender, who adds, "I think I feel repressed, sometimes, by the real. I don't know how to express the various emotional layers. I censor myself. It's too close to home. But inside a magical world, I feel totally free." Bender uses fantasy, rather than autobiography, to address the myriad of issues that affect modern women. "I can explore the ramifications of actions without comparing it directly to my life, and then I think I can be more honest," she explains.

The women of Bender's stories often engage in physical and behavioral transformations that can be construed as both self-empowering and self-destructive. Such contradictions are ubiquitous in Bender's work, and they reveal Bender's willingness to explore the complexity of the female psyche. "We women are a real mix of everything," she says, "and I feel obligated to create characters that are human and full of conflict. [It] seems like dealing with contradiction and internal clashes of desire are inherently human. And to allow women this contradictory nature is to welcome us into the human muck, which is, well, equality, in my book." In the stories "Quiet Please" and "Call My Name," included  in The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, women engage in sexual power plays that position them (at least initially) as dominant over their male partners. At the same time, many of the women in Bender's fiction struggle for self-affirmation by way of symbolic self-mutilation. In "Quiet Please," a female librarian seduces each of her male patrons as a way to cope with her father's death. Although the librarian's anonymous trysts denigrate her normally chaste lifestyle, in the hours after her father's death they serve as life-affirming relationships. In exploring the contradictions inherent in the lives of modern women, Bender reveals her feminist beliefs. "I do consider myself a feminist, as a person," she says, adding, "And I guess I assume that that will trickle into my writing. That said, I know some people feel like my characters are so broken, so self-destructive, and that doesn't reflect well on them as women. But what feminism means to me is the allowance of voice. And voice, in order to be honest, must be complex."

Bender is not afraid to address the difficult complexities that characterize not just female, but all human experience. In the world of Bender's stories, atrocities and monstrosities are allowed their places in the telling of the human condition. However, Bender is able to find the beauty in horror and the sense of humor in tragedy. In "What You Left in the Ditch," another story from Flammable Skirt, a man returns from war having lost his lips in an explosion. He is unable even to kiss his own wife, who initially copes with her grief by entertaining thoughts of sexual relations with a stranger. However, by the end of the story, the wife realizes that, despite his physical deformity, her husband remains the man with whom she is in love. In Bender's work, physical transformations become the external manifestations of internal emotional struggles. In "The Rememberer," also from Flammable Skirt, a woman witnesses her lover as he experiences reverse evolution. The man, who eventually becomes an amoeba, feels the burden of his humanity and seeks a state of pre-lingual paradise.

Through her fiction, Bender oscillates between the realms of the physical and the emotional, between the mundane and the sublime. Her stories lie on the edge between all-too-familiar daily reality and another level of consciousness; they speak of the magic of these in-between spaces, when the body is directed by the mind's secret dreams. According to Freud, dreams function as sites of distorted truths; in Bender's fiction, magic, a distortion of reality, thus becomes truth. In the story "Marzipan" from Flammable Skirt, a woman mourns the death of her mother. Her husband awakens one morning with a gaping hole in his stomach. Soon after, the wife announces she is pregnant. Nine months later, she gives birth to her own mother and the two women share the marzipan cake that was baked for the mother's funeral. The inability of the husband to nurture life is symbolized by the hole in his abdomen, while the life-force of the wife is symbolized by her ability to reverse death and realize her desire to be both a mother and a daughter again. Bender thus uses physical deformity and monstrosity both to expose and reconcile inner emotional distress.

In her first novel, An Invisible Sign of My Own, Bender explores the contradictory notion of purposeful failure through Mona, her obsessive-compulsive female protagonist. Mona quits almost every activity she starts, rather than accede to a socially-imposed desire to win. Quitting becomes her primary form of self-mutilation and isolation. Bender says, "I felt I'd found Mona when I wrote the scene where she breaks the soap bubble she's just made, in some weird attempt to undo her action." As in her short stories, Bender addresses the complexities of female desire, and the ways in which emotional fear is manifested through a sort of physical paralysis. "I was compelled by quitting, by the undoing of desire, of push, which, ultimately, is self-destructive," she says. "I do think [quitting is] often described as a fear of failure, and that at least half the people I know [fear] success. Succeeding is scary, for its own reasons, its own vulnerabilities."

Despite the wariness Bender feels towards success, she appears to have achieved it, garnering both respect from critics and a solid readership of devoted fans. Her short story collection was a 1998 New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and the Los Angeles Times selected An Invisible Sign of My Own as one of the year's best books in 2000. The main difference between writing short stories and writing novels, Bender says, is reflected in an author's comfort with either style. "Flannery O'Connor says writing a novel makes your hair fall out and your teeth hurt, or something like that-- and it seems true. There's just this wasteland feeling in the middle, and so much bumbling around, whereas with a story, it's so much easier to see the light at the end of the tunnel and drive towards it."

Bender is currently at work on her second novel and a new collection of short stories. She says that she wants to explore further the origins of her genre, in the Hans Christian Andersen tales that she loved as a child. "I'd love to try my hand at fables like that," she says, "as they so shaped my own aesthetic… Sometimes I think all I'm doing is just regurgitating what I learned in reading those, from my own point of view, in this contemporary world." Bender is also thinking about bringing her unique brand of magic realism onto the stage or the big screen. Although she has little experience writing in the two genres, she is adamant about determining her own success or failure. "I'd also like to try my hand at playwriting. Maybe even screenwriting, but I'd hate to give up the copyright and hand it over to someone else.

"I don't know if I could stand it."

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