Mind Bender

I just finished a huge new favorite last night.  I wanted to take a little time before posting about it because I wanted to savor it and mull it over for awhile.  I read Aimee Bender's The Girl in the Flammable Skirt years ago and was instantly smitten with her writing.  That collection has a featured spot on my shelf.  I tend to be very generous with books, but I never loan this one out.  It's filled with precious morsels.

There's something so peculiar about Bender's style of writing.  She sees things in such a pleasantly bizarre way.  It seems like she writes in technicolor somehow.  I feel like I'm eating her words instead of reading them, and they're delicious.  Don't ask me why I didn't read her next two works, An Invisible Sign of My Own and Willful Creatures.  I'll be buying them the minute I finish this post.  I guess I sort of lost track of her.  But when I saw The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake on the shelf the other day, I knew I'd hit the jackpot.

How much do you love this premise: the lead character, Rose, discovers on her ninth birthday that she can taste the emotions of the people who cook for her.  Her mother bakes her a lemon flavored birthday cake that looks incredible, but when she tastes it, she feels sad and hollow and horribly lonesome.  She quickly realizes that these emotions stem from the baker, not herself, and she embarks on a lifelong experiment of sampling food from all sorts of makers.  She desperately wants to get to the bottom of why she has this strange affinity for tuning into people's feelings through the dishes they cook.  She's often so overcome by the emotions in the food she eats that she winds up gorging on junk food.  When the food is processed mechanically, Rose can taste less of the overpowering human sentiment attached to it.

In his book Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames, Thich Nhat Hanh writes about how when you eat the meat of an animal who t is terrorized by his own slaughter, you are essentially eating that animal's fear.  He also says that you mustn't ever cook food when you are angry or upset, because you will unwittingly pass these emotions on to the people you're trying to nourish.  I think of that every time I cook or eat now.

Bender illustrates this theory with so much depth and creativity.  She gives Rose this gift that is sometimes unbearable, but every now and then, she stumbles upon a meal cooked with such grace and love and joy that she is overcome.  Ultimately, she learns to embrace her gift and to put it to good use, but at a great cost to her emotionally and psychologically.

She discovers later in life that she comes from a long line of relatives who possess such wondrous gifts.  Each has struggled with his or her odd talents, and each has tasted the rewards reaped by them.  Sometimes you have to have almost superhuman courage to embrace your gift or to use it to its fullest potential.  Sometimes a blessing feels more like a curse, but sometimes, with a little imagination, you can make the most out of what you're dealt.

I'm not sure why this book resonated so much with me, but I can't seem to stop thinking about it.  Have you ever suspected you had a great talent but were too afraid to use it, or too scared to let it show?  Did you ever want to do something so badly, but you were afraid people might judge you for it?  Do you ever think about a different path you might have taken if you'd truly followed your heart?  It may well be frightening to follow a dream that means the world to you.  It would be so devastating if it didn't work out.  But what if you never take the risk?  What if you miss your calling because you're too afraid to investigate it?  Is it better to be cautious or bold?  I'd rather take the risk.