18 Jun / The Bender Files: A Fictional Memoir by Æ Trinh
Excessive behavior has always provided seemingly unlimited literary fodder, but few writers have succeeded in creating great books from such source material. Alas, while Trinh’s debut effort has a few brow-raising hairpin page-turns, her characters’ bender-binges (drinking, drugs, bad relationships) soon grow too tedious to sustain a reader’s interest.
Eydie Le is a Vietnamese American working-girl living in LA-LA Land with her loser boyfriend. She can’t seem to leave the parasitic lover because he owes her $50K after three years together. Hoping someday one of his dubious schemes will actually come to fruition, she puts up with his drinking, cheating, generally all-around disgusting behavior.
Long after her two best friends (not to mention the reader) have had enough, Eydie finally decides to get out and heads to NYC where she’s always dreamed of living. The move doesn’t quite pan out but she does get a short gig that takes her to Cannes to work the film-fest party scene. More binge-ing ensues and after getting some (oh, no!) shocking news back home, she returns to LA determined to start anew.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2009