It’s June first and I’m headed to Skylight Books, an independent bookstore in Los Feliz, Los Angeles, to hear Aimee Bender read from her new novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. In an era when independent stores are becoming an entity of the past, Skylight has expanded. It’s evidence that Los Angeles’ literary community is still very much alive, made all the more apparent by the large crowd waiting to hear Aimee read.
    The introduction is brief. A list of Aimee’s books: her two novels The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake and An Invisible Sign of My Own,  her novella The Third Elevator, and her two short stories collections, Willful Creatures and The Girl in the Flammable Skirt. I recognize a few graduate students from the University of Southern California, where I took a writing seminar with Aimee. It’s always a little nerve-wracking studying with writers you admire. What if they hate your work? What if the friendly, inviting narrator of their books is actually a reprehensible person in the flesh? It’s been known to happen. But anyone who’s met Aimee Bender knows that this isn’t true of her. If there were an award for the nicest writer, she would be a finalist. As anyone who’s had her as a professor knows, she’s as good of a teacher as she is a writer. Like her magical, strange, and inimitable ideas for stories, her writing advice is so good it seems almost obvious, and yet, I’ve never heard it elsewhere.
    Aimee walks up to the podium with that ‘publication day’ glow.  She isn’t nervously knocking on the wooden podium and doesn’t look like she wants to disappear into it, although her characters might if given the same situation. She reads a selection from the first two chapters of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, in which Rose Edelstein discovers that she has the unique ability to taste people’s feelings in the foods they prepare. Rose realizes this on her ninth birthday, when her mother’s lemon cake with chocolate icing tastes “empty.” Rose continues to learn people’s unspoken feelings, including her mother’s silent loneliness. In a bite, she can locate the origin of every ingredient and subsequently craves the anonymity of processed foods—substances so disconnected from their origins that they remain silent. The novel is a portrait of the Edelstein family, narrated through Rose and her unique insight into the individuals around her.
    When Aimee is finished reading from her novel, there is the requisite Q and A session, my least favorite part of readings. Often, it seems that the audience isn’t asking questions so much as making statements about the author’s greatness—followed by the uncomfortable gratitude of the author—or observations disguised as questions, which make the questioner sound insightful without really asking the author much of anything. While there are a few questions on Aimee’s lack of quotation marks in her writing and her sharp dialogue, today’s questions are astute and interesting. People ask her about the germination of her ideas, the selection of foods she describes in the novel, her relationship to Los Angeles. Overall, the reading is a success. Pithy. Sweet. Energetic. Funny. Much like Aimee’s writing.
    After the reading, I got to catch up with my former writing professor. We chatted about her writing, her new novel, food, and the Hollywood Farmers Market.