BY VALENTINE SARGENT
Aimee Bender is the author of six books: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (1998) which was a NY 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, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010) which won the SCIBA award for best fiction, and an Alex Award, The Color Master, a NY Times Notable book for 2013, and her latest novel, The Butterfly Lampshade, which came out in July 2020, and was longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Award. Her books have been translated into sixteen languages.
In October, amidst the pandemic, I interviewed Aimee Bender using a video call platform to discuss her recently released book, The Butterfly Lampshade. As an avid reader of her work, it was exciting to sit down on opposite sides of the coast and discuss magic, fiction, and the gray areas.
The Fourth River: In your last novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, you focus on a mother-daughter relationship as well as in The Butterfly Lampshade. What fascinates you about this relationship between a young daughter and distraught mother?
Aimee Bender: When I think of the two books it does get more extreme in The Butterfly Lampshade. I’m interested so much in the world of the child and the child’s perception of things when the adults are struggling. I think all children are kind of alert to the adults around them and maybe some more than others, but the mother being often the kind of central adult to a child, to see any distress of any level can be disorienting. On an extreme level, how does that reorganize how the child imagines the world or feels responsible? In different ways with Rose and with Francie, both of them are kind of shouldering something unchildlike.
TFR: The Butterfly Lampshade tackles various themes such as human’s obsession with the material, mental illness in the family, childhood memory impacting the lives of adults, time, delineation, could you describe the process of writing The Butterfly Lampshade and the themes stitched within?
AB: I think some of it is this sort of intuitive process, well most of it, is trying to craft movements that feel honest and feel like they make sense on the page. And I think what I’m always searching for in writing short stories or novels is any kind of sentence or paragraph that I want to reread. So for The Butterfly Lampshade there were a lot of these parts where I just felt interested in all those things together, like how are these objects playing a role, how are they relating to this splintered sense of the world that the character is experiencing, how does that relate to her mom’s mental illness, what are these different perceptions that we’re all kind of living in our own sense of things and how does that affect the way we live and the choices we make, and the options available to us? And this was true of [The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake] too, wanting people on different parts of a spectrum of perspectives. A sort of fracturing perspectives. And for [The Butterfly Lampshade], this sort of permeability between reality and fantasy. What are the ways that is joyful and interesting and magical and what are the ways that’s unwell and dangerous, and what are those lines? And I think I’m just very interested in those gray areas.
TFR: When Francie builds a tent to use as her sacred place for remembering the magic and trauma she experienced as a child, it reminded me of psychedelic therapy, but without the psychedelics. Was this tent inspired by these explorative therapies?
AB: I know a lot about therapy therapy, but even as I was writing the book, I was aware the tent is very different because it’s not doing anything. It’s just a space. And I’m interested in meditation as well. I honestly don’t know, and I’d question it a little bit and think: is it okay that it is an inanimate space that she’s sort of filling with something? But somehow it felt kind of right, and it also parallels the writing process. It feels like all of those things: a kind of therapy, a meditation, a kind of creative process, and a magical space. There’s that point where they dust the tent with the rose that her cousin has and maybe that invokes the psychedelic piece that you’re talking about. Like something otherworldly.
I think I am very interested in small spaces. What happens when you expect to delineation and the sense of what happens when you separate yourself out from something. What can you then focus on?
In real life I don’t think our memory and our thinking work so smoothly as it does for her, but I sort of bought that it would for her.
TFR: The scenes on the Coast Starlight reveal more about Francie as a child and explore the beetle incident and how Francie was “chosen” to experience the magic. The two characters that the steward and Francie see are real, but also not, as they disappear. This seems to be a point about what is real, a hallucination, or magic, and sometimes we don’t get to know all the answers. Could you expand upon this idea?
AB: These were scenes I actually wrote pretty early on. I was sort of thinking about the book and looking back at the scenes, they fit in a way that kind of surprised me. I tend to shy away from thinking about meaning, particularly while I’m in the middle of writing, to try to let whatever feels right more than any sort of intellectual understanding of what it is, but I think that as the book is out in the world and as I think about it as a book and I’m separate from it, I get a little more space from it. There’s this line toward the end when she’s talking to Vicky and Francie says “No, I live here now.” And it goes back to this idea of perceptions and this sense of – there are things that are in different planes. And here are these two different people who live in different planes, who seem to live in a different world than everyone else. And Francie is a bit of a go-between and the steward is not. Like he can see them but he doesn’t interact with them. He finds them strange and Francie doesn’t so she’s permeable in a way the steward is not. And so seeing them, yes, as some type of missives in another realm and I don’t know what that means. If they would’ve wanted to take her with them, if they were just letting her know that she had an access point? The access point was something both beautiful, but also unsettling to her. And that ultimately, she’s not going to go to that place. It’s not clear that her mother lives there. I do believe there are so many ways that people’s minds work. That they are stacked in this way of viewing things. There isn’t some sort of standard to fall on. But that’s a moment of permeability for her.
There’s a hope in me that the images are unsettling enough that you can just live with them and not know what they mean. And that can be frustrating a little bit, but also at some point there will be an experience in your life, and you’ll be like, “This feels the same as the moment with Francie on the train.” The meaning can slowly unveil itself. It can be resonant without full understanding. And I find that territory interesting.
TFR: There is a part where Francie is sitting with her uncle outside the school, waiting for the babysitter. During their wait, Francie watches the children rush to their designated cars. This leads to a disassociation where she must find something to ground her immediately. I was so struck by this moment, because as a child, I would experience this often and never knew how to explain it or if anyone had ever experienced it as well. How did you come up with that moment, is this a personal experience or was this something someone told you about?
AB: I think that’s my hope, that something comes to light about our experiences that may be so connected to who we are, so that makes me happy to hear that. That feels like part of my project as a writer.
I didn’t feel this particular moment as a kid with the pickup line, but I did feel this type of moment where things abstract a little bit and there was a disassociating feeling. I think what I really wanted to do in that scene is lean into that really directly and apply it to the pickup line. It was interesting because I didn’t particularly need this scene plot wise, but I kept feeling like this scene was incredibly important in the book and it’s letting me get to know Francie. There’s just something about that feeling of an observant kid, and I was an observant kid, when you sort of lose yourself in the observation and maybe there’s something going on that’s hard to bear emotionally. The observations becomes enlarged and overwhelming and the cause and effect starts to separate a little bit. It can be very anxiety invoking or it can be very casual. I think for her it becomes increasingly scary because she’s about to have this major change and she’s going to be away from her mom, and suddenly all the kids are getting picked up and she’s not. It really is a potent moment in her life.
TFR: You write strictly fiction, does the personal ever intermingle with the fictious?
AB: All the time. And I think it’s Elizabeth McCracken who said, “When they say write what you know they don’t mean from the events of your life, they mean emotionally.” That always made so much sense to me, which is that any emotional state, like what we were just talking about, that dissociative state, feels familiar to me but then it was placing it inside someone else. Then I feel much freer to explore it and to change it. I think when it’s my own life it’s too familiar, I have no distance from it, and I don’t know how to write about it with any clarity. The element of imagination and sort of all these other things that my mind can play with gives me a job to do, and then the emotional stuff can flood in. But I really do believe that if you feel anything as a reader of a book, it means the writer has felt it in some way. I just don’t think we can convey on the page stuff we haven’t in some way empathically or in our own life experienced.
TFR: The world is impacted by a pandemic, climate change, and a slew of other problems that make it feel like we are in a science fiction novel. What role do you think fiction plays in society right now?
AB: So many roles! For one, it needs to reflect what we are experiencing, because we need help thinking about it. I can’t process what’s going on simply with my own scattered thinking and art is a way that something is beginning to be processed. At various stages, right? There’s art of right now, there’s the art of one year, there’s the art in ten years, and it all give us a way to think about something and feel about something.
So, fiction does that. Fiction allows space for the internal experience and the external experience, and for time to jump around. Fiction is so gymnastically able to move and that is really helpful. A lot of art forms can’t do that. Also, I think sometimes, we need a break. We need to be reminded of other things that are going on in our lives. Sometimes we just need something that is a delight. Ice cream and a really beautiful sentence that makes us happy. Sometimes that’s nourishing in a whole different way. As you talked about empathy, we need to jump into the lives of other people and see what that’s like. Sometimes we need to look at characters that reflect ourselves, in ways we didn’t know. This is all very good for us.
TFR: You mention pretzels in your writing often; do you like pretzels?
AB: That’s so funny, I have no awareness of that! Yeah, I like salt. I like salty foods. And maybe because their shapes are so fun, the little salt crystals. Yes, I do like pretzels quite a bit. As an item and a food.