Background

Aimee Bender was born on June 28, 1969, in Los Angeles, California, United States.

Education

Bender received her undergraduate degree from the University of California at San Diego, and a Master of Fine Arts from the creative writing Master of Fine Arts program at the University of California at Irvine. While at UCI she studied with Judith Grossman and Geoffrey Wolff.

Career

Aimee Bender is a writer and teacher of writing whose short stories have appeared in numerous publications. Bender’s The Girl in the Flammable Skirt is her debut collection of sixteen modem adult fairy tales which feature unusual characters, many with physical deformities. Library Journal reviewer Joanna M. Burkhardt said the events and people in the collection “somehow acquire the bizarre, the grotesque, and the darkly satirical.” The title of Bender’s collection is a reference to the cheap rayon skirts that combusted at the touch of a flame.

In “The Rememberer” when a woman watches her lover go through reverse evolution from ape to sea turtle to salamander she releases him to the ocean and says goodbye. “What You Left in the Ditch” tells of a woman’s seduction of a teen grocery clerk after her soldier husband returns from war minus his lips. In “Quiet Please” a librarian has encounters with a succession of men in the library’s backroom, her way of dealing with grief after her father’s death. A woman steals a ruby in “The Ring” and then finds that everything it touches turns red. In another story, a woman gives birth to her own elderly mother, while at the same time a hole ap¬pears in her husband’s body where his stomach had been.

A Publishers Weekly reviewer said that “as Bender explores a spectrum of human relationships, her perfectly pitched, shapely writing blurs the lines between prose and poetry.” Lisa Zeidner wrote in the New York Times Book Review that Bender’s stories “are powered by voice by the pleasure of the electric simile.” Zeidner noted the “magic realism” of Bender’s Los Angeles, calling it “Malibu Marquez.” Zeidner categorized the stories she felt were most realistic as being about “Fatalistic Dating,” while the “weakest ones juxtapose multiple plot lines.” In The Girl in the Flammable Skirt Bender “aims to be sneakily incendiary and often succeeds,” continued the critic: “many of these stories are as catchy as the book’s title, with a winning cheekiness.”

Bender’s next work was the novel An Invisible Sign of My Own. In this work, Bender tells the story of twenty-year-old Mona Gray, a second-grade mathematics teacher in a small town. Leading an unhappy life full of anxiety and depression, Mona is also obsessed with numbers. Reviewing this work for Booklist, Michelle Kaske noted that An Invisible Sign of My Own is a “wonderful treatment of anxiety, depression, and compulsion” and that readers of Bender’s previous works will “not be disappointed.”

Bender currently teaches creative writing at the University of Southern California where she served as Director of the University of Southern California Doctor of Philosophy in Creative Writing & Literature from 2012.

Achievements

• Aimee Bender's novels received multiple rewards and publications and her short story Faces became a 2009 Shirley Jackson Award finalist. Overall Bender"s works have also been published in Granta, Gentlemen’s Quarterly, Harper"s, Tin House, Opium Magazine, McSweeney"s, The Paris Review, The Coffin Factory, and several anthologies.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Color Master

    (A traumatic event unfolds when a girl with hair the color...)

    2013
  • An Invisible Sign of My Own: A Novel

    (Mona Gray was ten when her father contracted a mysterious...)

    2000
  • The Third Elevator

    (This is a limited edition short story by Aimee Bender, au...)

    2009
  • The Girl in the Flammable Skirt 1998
  • The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake 2010

Personality

Aimee described how she mostly takes inspiration from simple things around her. As an example, she takes her book Lemon Cake, where she thoroughly goes through food description. According to her words, she not only loves good food but also reading through cookbooks and even restaurant menus. Like that she was able to get inspired for numerous writings.

References

• Contemporary Authors New Revision Series: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide to Current Writers in Fiction, General Non-Fiction, Poetry, Journalism, Drama, Motion Pictures, Television, and Other Fields
  2010