Amy Bender is a fantastic writer. I found myself fully engaged in every story, believing her crazy storylines and loving the crazy characters. Amy Bender uses many techniques we discussed this semester, one of her best techniques is tone. In The Remeberer, the tone is full of loss but acceptance. This creates an atmosphere that helps the reader understand and relate to this crazy story. She wrote, “This is the limit of my limits: here it is. You don’t ever know for sure where it is and then you bump against it and bam, you’re there.” In the middle of these stories are amazing one-liners that really twist our perceptions and show a different moral to the story.
Another prominent technique in Benders writing is setting. In Quiet Please, she takes a normal, quiet library setting and turns it into the exact opposite. Suddenly the library is a sex room and the librarian is a nymphomaniac. She tells this story and the back room and the ceiling are the biggest part of the story. The librarian doesn’t like the ceiling with fairies and in the end, she is lifted up to touch and change the fairies into something she can understand. She uses the library to change how she feels. Bender writes, “She squeezes his wrist and then concentrates on putting herself back together.” And again “She obliterates herself and then buttons up.” This character is constantly trying to put herself together but runs a destructive cycle of breaking herself again.
Fugue was probably the best story when looking at technique. The timeline is mixed, we get the story of a crazy man that likes to mess up people’s lives. He steals a man’s wife and shoots the husband. Then he drops her on the side of the road. Next, we are in the house of a peppy girl and a sleepy guy. The woman knocks on the door, offering a wedding band in exchange for a place to sleep. They let her sleep and the guy, Haggie, tries to commit suicide. Then we are back in time to when the woman is dropped on the side of the road and she lights a bush on fire. This skipping order sets the pace for this story and helps the reader understand the manic emotions of the characters. It is really outside of the norm and I think she did a fantastic job.
I can’t wait to read the rest of this book. It is engaging and beautiful, using the most unusual stories to portray loss and loneliness. I find myself enrapture by the quirky characters and odd endings. Some may argue that the stories lack purpose. In my opinion, purpose has a different meaning for different people. What I see as important in the story may be just a side detail to someone else.
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