Title: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt Author: Aimee Bender
Published: July 13, 1998
Genre(s): Magical Realism
Page Count: 192
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Bold, sexy, and daring, these stories portray a world twisted on its axis, an unconventional place that resembles nothing so much as real life, in all its grotesque, beautiful glory. Bender's prose is glorious, musical, and colloquial, an anthology of the bizarre. In 'The Rememberer', a man undergoes reverse evolution -- from man to ape to salamander -- at which point a friend releases him into the sea, while in another story a woman gives birth to her mother. A grief-stricken librarian decides to have sex with every man who enters her library. A half-mad, unbearably beautiful heiress follows a strange man home, seeking total sexual abandon: He only wants to watch game shows. A woman falls in love with a hunchback; when his deformity turns out to be a prosthesis, she leaves him. A wife whose husband has just returned from the war struggles with the heartrending question: Can she still love a man who has no lips?
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.
