Greetings, writers—
Yesterday, George Saunders posed the following question on his Substack, Story Club:
Has a short story, a novel, a poem, or a play ever objectively altered your trajectory in life? (Ever caused you to DO something? Move, quit a job, start a degree, change course, etc.)?
My first thought—“No”—was quickly followed by my second, which was this: if that poet from the Iowa Writers Workshop whose name I’ve forgotten (Mike? Matt?) had given a copy of Amy Hempel’s Reasons to Live to a different girl at the party that night, would I be a writer today?1
I’ve talked about Hempel before, but I’m doing it again because she was one of my idols. Her stories were precise but mysterious, comic but heartbreaking. Her narrators were weird, solitary, maybe even congenitally unsettled. There were a lot of animals in Reasons to Live, and there was a lot of sadness, and these were things that spoke to me. And though I knew Hempel’s stories were profoundly superior to anything I was writing at the time, they seemed possible to imitate in a way that might teach me something. And I do think they did.
“My heart—I thought it stopped.” That’s the first line of the first story in Reasons to Live. Honestly, it’s barely even a story, and it’s definitely not the best piece in the collection, but how’s that for starting with a bang?2
“A blind date is coming to pick me up, and unless my hair grows an inch by seven o’clock, I am not going to answer the door.” That’s the opening of story number two, “Tonight is a Favor to Holly.”
“In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried”3 has been widely anthologized for good reason. “Nashville Gone to Ashes” and “Beg, Sl Tog, Inc, Cont, Rep” are also wonderful.
In “Nashville Gone to Ashes,” a woman mourns the death of her veterinarian husband, Flea, as she cares for the animals he left behind. Cute pet action—a sarcastic mynah, a cat who pulls all the Kleenex out of the box, a young Russian wolfhound “the size of a float in the Rose Bowl Parade”—lightens what’s ultimately a meditation on love and grief.
Will Rogers called vets the noblest of doctors because their patients can’t tell them what’s wrong. The doctor has to reach, and he reaches with his heart.
I think it was that love that I loved. That kind of involvement was reassuring; I felt it would extend to me, as well. That it did not or that it did, but only as much and no more, was confusing at first. I thought, My love is so good, why isn’t it calling the same thing back?
Things might have collapsed right there. But the furious care he gave the animals gave me hope and kept me waiting.
It’s a very short story, and I want to quote nearly all of it. I also want to flip to other stories and fling more lines at you, lines like “I planned to knit myself a mailbox and a car, perhaps even a dog and a leash to walk him” or “The worst of it is over now, and I can’t say that I am glad. Lose that sense of loss—you have gone and lost something else” or “I say an omen that big can be ignored.”
Here’s the entirety of the title story from her 2019 collection, Sing To It.
At the end, he said, No metaphors! Nothing is like anything else. Except he said to me before he said that, Make your hands a hammock for me. So there was one.
He said, Not even the rain—he quoted the poet—not even the rain has such small hands. So there was another.
At the end, I wanted to comfort him. But what I said was, Sing to it. The Arab proverb: When danger approaches, sing to it.
Except I said to him before I said that, No metaphors! No one is like anyone else. And he said, Please.
So—at the end, I made my hands a hammock for him.
My arms the trees.
No animals there, just grief.
Today, I offer two assignments. First, consider answering Professor Saunders’ question (in the comments, or by hitting reply, if the spirit moves you—I’d love to know about any life-changing literature).
And second, pick a Hempel’s lines that speaks to you and begin writing from there. What direction can you take “an omen that big can be ignored” or “Things might have collapsed right there” or “The worst of it is over now, and I can’t say that I am glad”?
Happy Friday, happy writing—
Emily
It’s a tempting to follow (though “construct” might be the better term) the thread of causality that begins with my post-adolescent love affair with Hempel’s stories to my current work as one of James Patterson’s cowriters, but don’t worry, I’m totally not going to bore you with that.
Technically, of course, it starts with silence—the silence of a skipped heartbeat. “So I got in my car and headed for God,” the narrator says. Later, sitting in an unfamiliar church: “I thought about the feeling of the long missed beat, and the tumble of the next ones as they rushed to fill the space. I sat there—in the high brace of quiet and stained glass—and I listened.”
From The New Yorker again: “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” can be seen as an inversion of Grace Paley’s great story “A Conversation with My Father,” in which an old and bedridden man asks his daughter to tell him, for once, “a simple story. . . . Just recognizable people and then write down what happened to them next.” The writer-daughter, of course, does not oblige.
Sketch of a Landscape by Paul Celan
....toward
The center, gray,
A rock-saddle and on it,
Dented and charred,
The Beast's brow with
Its radiant gaze.