The Real Pick-Up Artist

For all intents and purposes, let’s say you’re at a bar. You’re standing around with a group of your friends and you’re either trying to make sultry over-the-shoulder eye contact with some Cro-Magnon male across the room, or you’re showing off all your bright tail feathers like a studly peacock while your bros snicker around you and make bets on whether or not you’ll actually score tonight. You are looking your best, putting on a brilliant show of what you think are the most successful of your imbecilic mating tactics, and just before you despair completely and relinquish yourself to an evening of nursing your wounds in the darkness of your room as Coldplay blasts in the background (because regardless of the fact that Chris Martin’s lyrics never seem to make any sense, that man always sounds like he’s in a state of epic sadness and tonight, man, you feel his pain), some decent-looking human being approaches you. They smile, you smile, and suddenly there’s all this vain hope building up inside of you.

But then this person opens their mouth to speak, and what comes out vaguely triggers your upchuck reflex – which, if you’re woman, will be a pick-up line like, “I’m no Flinstone, but I can make your bed rock!” and, if you’re a man, will be something psychotically over-eager like, “I can’t wait to tell all my friends and family about you!” And just like that, with one sentence, this maladroit has been red-flagged as someone to spurn upon first sight.

Me, I’m like this with men and books. One chance, baby – one chance to impress and fascinate before you’re promptly dropped like that useless “Science and Society” course I took in my freshman year of college. Of the few (books, not men) that have managed to pass this ruthless and probably completely counter-productive initial screening, the best and my most favorite come-ons have come from Aimee Bender.

When you open up a book and read a line like, “My lover is experiencing reverse evolution,” or, “I’m spending the afternoon auditioning men,” or, “Steven returned from the war without lips,” or even simply, “Let me open it up for you,” how do you say no to that? The thing is, a good first line, like its pick-up line equivalent, is hard to come by – especially one that isn’t deceiving. Aimee Bender’s endearingly bizarre, surrealist fiction doesn’t reel you in only to bail when it starts to feel real and you start to get emotionally invested; it takes you by the hand and stays long after you’ve read the final word of the final sentence on the final page precisely because it’s more than just an intriguing façade – it’s real at its core.

Her latest novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is about a girl who can literally taste the emotion of whoever made her food with every bite she takes. It’s the kind of premise that prompts you to question, prod, and pry, but the protagonist’s subtextual struggle with the aftermath of these tastes and what that means for her own ability, or lack thereof, to come to terms with her own emotional life is what makes you dig your fingers and toes deep into the story and stay.

And that? Well, that’s the best pay-off from a come-on I could ever hope for, from a book or a man.

Jayne Wilson wrote her first short story when she was six-years-old – it was god-awful, but she’s never looked back. She graduated from the University of California, Davis where she studied English with a Creative Writing emphasis. She shall kill no albatross.