The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

by Aimee Bender

Hello, readers! Although I’m not there while you’re reading, I thoroughly believe in the beautiful, profound space created between writer and reader, what Paul Auster says—“the book doesn’t only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is.” So: thank you for the duet!

I could feel the tears beginning to collect in my throat again, but I pushed them apart, away from each other. Tears are only a threat in groups.

I’m so interested in tears, which may sound strange to hear, but when the crying moment has passed its peak and there’s enough space between me and my own strong tearful feeling, I have found it a little fascinating to learn a bit about what they’re like—how sometimes they’re hot, and sometimes they’re cool, and this seems to relate directly to the type of tears they are, the mood, the kind of pain or feeling they’re expressing. Even their speed! And in their single vs. groupiness as well. Sometimes, if need be, you can stave off that one. But when they flood, they flood.

I was with them for all of it, but more like an echo than a participant.

This was a very familiar feeling to me as the youngest child—I don’t have a brother but have two vibrant older sisters who were faster at everything than me for the longest time, and I often felt like this echo person.

We hit the sidewalk, and dropped hands. How I wished, right then, that the whole world was a street.

What is it about holding hands? I used to fantasize about holding my first hand romantically—when sex was too scary to picture it was the initial step, the first contact I could bear to consider.

We colluded in this way: as long as I didn’t announce that I was a kid, he wouldn’t rise up as a parent, and for an hour, we could both have a little respite from our roles.

Because we are all actually people during all of it, roles aside.

Several of the girls at the party had had sex, something which sounded appealing but only if it could happen with blindfolds in a time warp plus amnesia.

I am very drawn to depictions of high school in books, TV, film—it’s such a heightened time, and also I was so overwhelmed by everything at that age that it feels fun to revisit with greater perspective. That people were actually having sex in high school felt so shocking to me! I remember the first date I went on; when he came to the door, as my parents insisted, my lip was twitching so bad I could hardly say hello. I was just terrified at that time by all of it, and clearly Rose is as well. And also, of course, it seemed fun, and I was envious of those other savvier people, too. Nowadays, I love seeing teenagers who are inside their own faces already—I’m a bit in awe of them. It took me years to feel like I was present and inside my own face, processing my own experience.

I’d just like to stay for a little while longer, I said, as quietly as I could. You’re such a fucking pain! he said. You’ve always been the worst pain in my fucking ass! and he slammed the laptop lid down, but he did not get out of that chair.

I spent so long on this page, feeling like every word was a vector to point to that word chair. I kept stripping away the extra words, and adjusting the rhythms, because the word had taken on so much weight to me, was becoming the central mystery of the book, and I felt a kind of weight to it on the page, a heaviness, an intensity, and I wanted to give it as much power as I possibly could. This process of revision, of streamlining focus, was one of the most intense and exciting writing experiences I have ever had.

To see someone you love, in a bad setting, is one of the great barometers of gratitude.

I would love to hear people’s stories of this feeling. It strikes me as one of the most powerful human surges of great appreciation and humility. How you’re somewhere full of need, and scanning the world, and no one is quite the person you’re looking for, and you keep looking, and checking, and then there’s that person and the rightness is overwhelming.

That she might not actually know us seemed the humblest thing a mother could admit.

There was a moment when my own mother did say this to me. I was going through a difficult time, and she was trying to be helpful, and wasn’t sure what to do, and we both knew she was trying, and we also knew that I would have to figure out what I needed another way. She said it lovingly, with no judgment of any of us—it really struck me then, and although the mother in the book is not much like my own mother, this line really is an reverberation of what she said to me then, placed into Lane, who herself is in a more extreme version of a situation with both her children struggling in the world in a way she can’t grasp or fix.

Acknowledgments

My latest book, 'The Butterfly Lampshade,' shares some of the themes present in Lemon Cake—mostly I’m always trying to think about the way different perspectives live in the world—different points of view, different mindsets, different minds, different ailments. For Lemon Cake, it was so much about sensitivities of all kinds. For this new book… I’m not sure how to characterize it yet, but it has something to do with perceptions of reality. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50607773-the-butterfly-lampshade