The Girl in the Flammable Skirt: Stories

I chanced upon this collection of short stories while wandering the fiction stacks at my local library. The title and the cover drew me in; I started reading the first story, and I couldn't put it down. I checked it out, took it home, and finished it within a few hours.

This collection is probably not for everyone. It's absurd, it's bizarre, it's surreal. Bender mixes sexuality, grief, and the imagination in a way that is at once fascinating and repellent. On first glance, many of the stories seem light, insubstantial, comical. Many of them take on the familiar style of fairy tales. But each one has a dark underbelly, much like life itself. They are confusing, incomplete, imperfect, and completely haunting. I finished the book and I show more found that I couldn't stop thinking about them. This is a book that will stick with me, and one that I will probably have to read again.

My favorite stories were "Drunken Mimi," a high school love story about an imp and a mermaid, both pretending to be human; "What You Left in the Ditch," the heartbreaking tale of a woman whose husband returns from the war with no lips and her attempts to deal with the loss; and "The Healer," a tale of two mutant girls in a small isolated town, one with a hand of fire, the other with a hand of ice.

Highly recommended for fans of magical realism and inventive symbolic prose. I loved it, in spite of, because of, all its weirdness. I will definitely be looking to read more by Bender. Five stars. show less

I should have known better. I don't typically like short stories. And I didn't like the full length novel of Bender's I read long ago either. Given both of these truths, I never should have read this collection. But I spent money on it once upon a time so I couldn't let it go without reading it. Sadly, neither my opinion of short stories nor of Bender's writing has changed after reading this.

The short stories in this collection are strange. Although missing the political critique of magical realism, they qualify in every other sense. The stories are set in the real world but are peppered with fantastical, grotesque, and deliberately weird situations, characters, or plot happenings. In Bender's fictional worlds, there are librarians who show more take male patrons into the staff room all day long for sex, children with unexplained powers in one hand, an ex-soldier missing his lips whose wife fantasizes about kissing people with lips, a man who is evolving backwards from man to ape on down to single celled organism, a father with a literal hole through his body and a mother who gives birth to her own deceased (now reanimated) mother, an unbalanced socialite who stalks men, a Jewish woman who runs a group for runaway teens being led around by a young neo-Nazi during a trust exercise, an imp and a mermaid discovering one another in high school, and more. Her characters are often mutants and their worlds are dark, off-kilter, and somehow still mundane. Many of the stories are overtly (and oddly) sexual. The writing is certainly competent but it lacked affect, the stories holding me at a remove and coming across as nothing so much as the answers to writing prompt exercises. show less

In this collection of intelligent, quirky, highly original stories, Bender compassionately explores human lives and emotions using a series of surreal plot devices – a woman’s lover evolves in reverse, going from ape on down to single-celled organism; a woman gives birth to her own mother, while her husband’s stomach vanishes; a woman falls in love with a house robber and finds that the rings he brings her leave permanent stains; a man comes home from war without lips and his wife begins to fetishize kissing; a woman falls in love with a hunchback and leaves him when she finds his hump is prosthetic; a grieving librarian seduces all the male patrons.

As she takes you from the grotesque to the beautiful to the simply odd, show more Bender’s writing manages to be unique but never gimmicky, and always wise and insightful. These stories are sure to keep you thinking long after you’ve closed the book! show less

I saw Aimee Bender read to a roomful of students this fall. She read her story, Lemonade, that had been published in the ‘Fantastic Women’ issue of Tin House. Although I was slightly disappointed that she had chosen this specific story to read, since I had already read it but hadn’t had a chance to read many others. But it was nice to hear her read. The narrator’s inner-voice is neurotic and child-like but charming. Afterwards, there was the mandatory Q&A session.

As an answer to one of the questions, Aimee Bender said that she started each story with a What If. A rather typical scenario for a writer, sure, but when you consider what the specific What If question had to be for each story. Well. It gets much less typical.

What if a show more husband devolved until he was a tadpole? What if a husband returned from war with no lips? What if one day a librarian were to become incredibly horny? What if…What if…What if…

Aimee Bender is brilliant.

Her prose is straight-forward but beautiful. Her stories are always unpredictable, unexpected, but utterly believable. And. Well. Beautiful.

Some notable first sentences:

* “My lover is experiencing reverse evolution. I tell no one.” from The Rememberer
* “I’m spending the afternoon auditioning men. They don’t know it. This is a secret audition, come as you are.” by Call My Name
* “Renny’s phone privileges were revoked when they discovered a swastika carved into his bed board.” from Skinless
* There was an old man and an old woman and they dreamed the same dreams. They’d been married for sixty years, and their arm skin now wrinkled down to their wrists like kicked-down bedsheets. from Dreaming in Polish

One of my favorite stories is Fugue. A masterful construction that is so exactly and so not exactly its name. I played piano for twelve years, so I’m well aware of the musical construction of the fugue. The song with various themes that continue to emerge. Fugue is exactly that. But the subject matter? Not, I’m sure, subject matter Bach or Beethoven would approve of. show less

I dunno man, I kinda wish I could rate it 4.5. While the subject matter was not my total fave, lots of unrequited romance and parents dying, the stories were powerful enough that I had to physically put the book down and walk away for a few minutes. Her statement of fact one-liners were so so great. I really appreciated her writing style.

The Girl in the Flammable Skirt was a beautiful read. The collection of short stories about life, desires and attempts at fulfillment often left me with blinking eyes as I tried to absorb the endings. I will admit, it took a few stories to get into the style of endings that Aimee Bender plays in, but after about the third story, I was addicted. She often ends with sentences that seem to give very little in the way of conclusion, but tell far more than a skimming read would make surface.

The stories may seem a bit far fetched, some because of a slightly magical element, but the writing makes them absorbing and encompassing. My favorite story was Loser,”an orphan who had a knack for finding lost things”, and his experience in finding a show more lost child and realizing that he himself is lost.

While the tenative price listed on the back of my bound galley edition is $21.95 and I wouldn’t necessarily pay that, I would certainly have spent more than $1… and now I know that I can bring myself to pay more than clearance shelf prices for Aimee Bender again. show less

Having read and enjoyed Bender's Willful Creatures, I was surprised at how few of these stories resonated for me. Bender is a master of the quirky, but many of these stories seemed so esoteric that the witty commentary was lost along the way. I felt they were sexually saturated almost to the point of obsession (in many cases), but I'm also open to the idea that it was part of the point.

All that said, there were several stories I did enjoy, including the majority of the offerings in Part Three. The poignancy in "Skinless" (Part One), "The Healer" and "Loser" (both in Part Three) touched me deeply, particularly in the case of "Loser." Bender investigates what it means to be "lost" and indeed, "found." Her protagonist has the ironic gift show more to find what others have lost and the end of the story made my eyes glisten.

"Drunken Mimi" (Part Two) is a clever mixing of fantasy and realism wherein two outcasts find each other through a world that has long rejected impishness and magic.

I do think that Bender's work speaks differently to the reader depending on his/her frame of mind, place in life, etc. This is a positive, as there will be a story for everyone in this collection. I'll be interested to re-read these stories several years from now and see if they speak any differently to me. For indeed, Bender does have a gift for stories that speak. show less