Stories We Love: “Off,” by Aimee Bender
Kent Kosack on the complexities of motivation and action in Aimee Bender’s “Off.”
Kent Kosack on the complexities of motivation and action in Aimee Bender’s “Off.”
Shawn Andrew Mitchell on Gifts of Love, Meaning, and Craft in Aimee Bender’s “The Red Ribbon.”
If you are what you eat, what happens when someone else eats what you are? In Aimee Bender’s latest novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, 9-year old Rose first experiences this conundrum when she tastes her mother’s birthday cake, only to come away with the uncomfortable understanding of her mother’s lonely dissatisfaction with life. The cake betrays the inner feelings of the cook. Over the course of the novel and Rose’s life, the predicament continues, building to an unwanted fixation of what constitutes food and those who grow and prepare it.
