The Rememberer

Aimee Bender was born in Los Angeles, California on June 28, 1969. Her father is a psychiatrist, and her mother is a dance teacher and choreographer. In a 1998 interview with Pif Magazine, Bender stresses the influence her parents have on her creative process, pointing out that her father works to help people become aware of their unconscious thoughts, while her mother explores her own unconscious, using what she discovers there to create original dances. Bender states that she combines these two approaches of revealing and expressing the mysteries of the unconscious world through storytelling.

In a discussion with The Masters Review, Bender shares that while she was writing “The Rememberer,” she was going through a romantic breakup and her grandmother was dying. Bender’s mother made a comment that seeing her grandmother’s decline was like watching someone slip back to infancy. In the same interview, Bender also reveals that she’d once had a dream about reverse evolution. She states that her mother’s comment and her dream fed the story. Ultimately, Bender says she used the idea of Ben’s reverse evolution to explore the theme of losing someone.

“The Rememberer” is the opening piece in Bender’s collection of 16 short stories, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, which was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 1998.