The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

by Aimee Bender

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.