The Girl In The Flammable Skirt (1999) - Plot & Excerpts
I love Aimee Bender’s writing. Her short stories are probably the weirdest things I’ve ever read, but they’re done so well. The Girl in the Flammable Skirt is possibly my favorite volume by Bender, full of super-short short stories that are funny and strange and grotesquely sexual and excellent all at once. I’m not sure any other author has managed to achieve such a different style so well; I think it’s distinctly a quality of Bender’s.The premises for these stories are undeniably bizarre. A lover experiences reverse evolution; a father wakes up with a hole in his stomach; a pregnant teen falls in love with her hunchback step uncle; a grieving librarian has sex with 7 library patrons in one day; an imp-in-hiding has lustful thoughts about his mermaid classmate. The Girl in the Flammable Skirt is full of the improbable and awkward, yet somehow Bender manages to make them all seem beautifully normal. It’s a gift, truly.I find myself returning to Aimee Bender’s prose not for her unusual sort of magical realism, but more for her prose, which is absolutely gorgeous. At times, the stories in this volume can seem crass, but at other times, they’re also surprisingly insightful, and speak to the human condition in a way that might be unexpected, for a short story about a woman whose husband returned from the war with plastic lips.My favorite stories were “What You Left in the Ditch”, “Skinless”, “Legacy”, and “Call My Name” (which I’d read previously in a fiction writing class). Unfortunately, the titular story, “The Girl in the Flammable Skirt”, wasn’t really a stand-out addition to this short story collection, though it did offer one of the most memorable passages out of the entire set of 16 stories. But what I kept wondering about is this: that first second when she felt her skirt burning, what did she think? Before she knew it was candles, did she think she’d done it herself? With the amazing turns of her hips, and the warmth of the music inside her, did she believe, for even one glorious second, that her passion had arrived?I think any reader who enjoys short stories and doesn’t mind the more grotesque side of the often lovely magical realism genre should give this story collection a chance. The Girl in the Flammable Skirt is excellent in terms of prose, and shows off Aimee Bender’s formidable creativity to its greatest advantage. I think that this is probably where to start if you’ve never read Bender before, but also a great place to come back to if you’ve already experienced her style.Reviews & more at Respiring Thoughts
I first read this collection in high school, loved it despite not really 'getting' any of it, and over the past few years would crack it open every now and then to read the first two stories—"The Remember," and "Call My Name." "The Rememberer," because I'm continually moved by that story's narrator; her grace and her grief. And "Call My Name," because I'm always amazed at the way Bender can get a reader [specifically, me] to sympathize with characters who lack any redeeming qualities whatsoever. [I also admire the way Bender navigates the tragedy and the inherent humor in that narrator's disposition; how her self-delusion/narcissism is both very, very sad and very, very funny.] Over the past few days, I decided to give the whole collection a read-through and see if I couldn't hang my hat on the stories that came after these two favorites as well. As was the case in high school, there are still a few of these stories I just did not, for lack of a better word, get. A story like "Marzipan," though I much enjoyed the sentence-level writing and thought the premise itself was inventive, still left me unsatisfied and feeling like I'd missed the set-up, the punchline, or both. I felt that way about a few other stories, too—like "Legacy" and "Drunken Mimi." While I don't doubt there's intention at work in those stories, it was certainly lost on me. That said, I love so fiercely the other stories in this collection that I quickly forgive those stories [and "The Healer," too, which seems to be a favorite here but left me puzzled] and applaud the rest. "What You Left in the Ditch," "Fugue," "Dreaming in Polish,"—these are wonderful stories. My favorite story of the bunch, though, is "Skinless." If you held a gun to my head I couldn't tell you why, only that it made me feel immensely hopeful and inestimably sad at the same time, which is the work of short fiction. Which leads me to what I've come away with after the re-read: the idea that, in Bender's stories, understanding is not nearly as important as evocation. What the stories bring to the surface in the reader surely matters more than anything else.
What do You think about The Girl In The Flammable Skirt (1999)?
I like her writing style--concise, not fluffy. The ideas behind the "stories" in the book (and I'm using the word stories with a grain of salt, because they seem more like snippets of creative writing exercises and not actual stories) are okay, but in the end these tales are woefully underdeveloped. I love "weird," but for weird to work, it has to have a point. Weirdness just for the sake of being weird just doesn't work for me. In the end, the majority of these stories are just left hanging, as if she just got tired of working on them and decided to move on to the next. The characters lack depth, are unmemorable, and in some instances are just simply incredibly vapid.There was a germ of something creative and clever here, but I felt that it just never quite got there.
—Diane Mcafee
How many times has this happened to you?You're reading a novel about a single mother struggling to raise two kids in a backwoods town in Kentucky and you flip to the author info on the dust jacket...only to discover that the writer is a single mother raising two kids in a small town in Kentucky, and you say to yourself (or the person trying to sleep next to you), "HOW IS THIS EVEN FICTION?"Well, that won't happen when you're reading THIS book. Unless Ms. Bender is the weirdest person who ever lived, these stories are NOT lifted from her own life experience, but are born, instead, from a delightfully twisted imagination.Take a look at the first lines from some of her strange tales:~Steven returned from the war without lips.~One week after his father died, my father woke up with a hole in his stomach.~There was an imp who went to high school with stilts on so that no one would know he was an imp.~There were two mutant girls in the town: one had a hand made of fire and the other had a hand made of ice.~The hunchback took in the pregnant girl to hide her from high school until the baby popped out.Well, okay...maybe Aimee WAS once cared for by a hunchback, but the rest of that stuff - ZOWIE! - pure imagination!Her work is sad and sweet and charming and delightful and purely FICTITIOUS! I LOVE IT! And if you're sick of fiction that seems a bit too much like real life, you might LOVE IT, too.
—Melki
This collection of short stories is, for some reason, divided into three parts. Part One is the strongest. "The Rememberer" is a fascinating, magical tale about a dwindling relationship, although for a reason that no one has ever experienced in real life, but anyone can relate to. "Call My Name" is a semi-erotic tale of desire. "What You Left in the Ditch" is a tragic story of how to continue loving someone who has been disfigured in war (in this case losing nothing but his lips, which are so small yet so important). "The Bowl" is the short story equivalent of how you feel when someone waves to you, and you wave back, and you find out they're waving to someone behind you the whole time. And "Marzipan" is a freakish and delightful tale of grieving. Part Two begins with "Quiet Please", yet another grieving story, but this one with a raucous erotic twist. "Skinless", as the title implies, is dark. It kind of reminds me of a depression version of the Brie Larson film Short Term 12. "Drunken Mimi" is a diverting fairy tale love story between an imp and a mermaid who are both masquerading as normal high school students. "Fugue" and "Fell This Girl" were less than memorable.Part Three begins with "The Healer," one of the more inventive stories (And that's saying a lot) in the collection, about a girl with a hand of ice and another with a hand of fire. That's a keeper, worth the price of admission. Things get a little bit nutso with "Loser", "Legacy", and "The Ring," three stories that don't seem to grow much past their, admittedly brilliant, concepts. "Dreaming in Polish" was okay, and the title story, "The Girl in the Flammable Skirt" barely smoulders. It simply steams. The collection ends with a small puff of air instead of blazing inferno.Part One: *****Part Two: ****Part Three: ***Average: ****
—Chance Lee
