The writing I tend to think of as ‘good’ is good because it’s mysterious.
AIMEE BENDERThe writing I tend to think of as ‘good’ is good because it’s mysterious.
AIMEE BENDERLight is good company, when alone; I took my comfort where I found it, and the warmest yellow bulb in the living-room lamp had become a kind of radiant babysitter all its own.
AIMEE BENDERMy eyelids are my own private cave, he murmured. That I can go to anytime I want.
AIMEE BENDERListen. Look. Desire is a house. Desire needs closed space. Desire runs out of doors or windows, or slats or pinpricks, it can’t fit under the sky, too large. Close the doors. Close the windows.
AIMEE BENDERMy lover is experiencing reverse evolution.
AIMEE BENDERIt was like we were exchanging codes, on how to be a father and a daughter, like we’d read about it in a manual, translated from another language, and were doing our best with what we could understand.
AIMEE BENDERI watched as she added a question mark at the end. Arc, line, space, dot.
AIMEE BENDERIt’s a pleasure to dive into Hirshberg’s storytelling skills in American Morons.
AIMEE BENDERIt seems the best work I do is when I am really allowing the unconscious to rule the page and then later I can go back and hack around and make sense of things.
AIMEE BENDERI am the drying meadow; you the unspoken apology; he is the fluctuating distance between mother and son.
AIMEE BENDERTo see someone you love, in a bad setting, is one of the great barometers of gratitude.
AIMEE BENDERWhile she cut the mushrooms, she cried more than she had at the grave.
AIMEE BENDERWhen language is treated beautifully and interestingly, it can feel good for the body: It’s nourishing; it’s rejuvenating.
AIMEE BENDERBut what I kept wondering about is this: that first second when she felt her skirt burning, what did she think?
AIMEE BENDERAs a writer you ask yourself to dream while awake.
AIMEE BENDERIf everything kept to its normal progression, we would live with the sadness-cry and then walk-but what really breaks us cleanest are the losses that happen out of order.
AIMEE BENDER