Amy Hempel is an internationally-acclaimed short-story writer and journalist, celebrated by critics, writers and readers for her economical approach to form and style, her sensitive handling of loss and alienation and her penetrating wit. To date she has published five collections of short stories, two of which include a novella.
Hempel was born in Chicago in 1951. Words played an important role in her life from an early age. She tells the Paris Review:
I had a mother I could only seem to please with verbal accomplishments of some sort or another. She read constantly, so I read constantly. If I used words that might have seemed surprising at a young age, she would recognize that and it would please her. We could talk about what we read—that was safe territory. This was the way I had a chance of getting her approval. Language. Language and literature. (Hempel “Art”)
Hempel initially hoped to become a vet but “slipped up” when she “hit organic chemistry” (“Art”). Her love of animals emerges frequently in her stories; dogs in particular play significant roles in her characters’ lives. Hempel moved to California in her teenage years. The state would become the setting of much of her fiction. She trained and worked as a journalist, appreciating the rules that the discipline offered. Fiction writing was, in contrast, “intimidating” (“Art”). During her time in California Hempel suffered several tragedies. First her mother and then her aunt committed suicide. Hempel sustained injuries in two serious car accidents. She also lost her best friend, Jessica Wolfson, to leukaemia. In 1975 Hempel moved to New York, where she attended a writing class with renowned editor Gordon Lish. She would go on to work with Lish on her short fiction; her first collection is dedicated to him, “the teacher”. Since achieving great success as a writer, Hempel has taught at a number of prestigious institutions. She was Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Florida and taught English at Harvard University. She currently teaches at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas.
Hempel’s first short-story collection, Reasons to Live, came out in 1985. The stories vary significantly in length, from flash fiction such as the opening story “In a Tub”, to the eleven-page short story “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried”, Hempel’s most anthologised work to date. “In a Tub” and the shorter pieces in the collection prompted questions that would arise repeatedly in reviews of Hempel’s work: what is the most appropriate taxonomy for the briefest of narratives? Are they pieces of flash fiction, prose poems, sketches or very short stories? Whatever their preferred term, readers and reviewers are in agreement on the depth and impact of these texts. In this opening story of the collection, Hempel captures only a handful of moments but leaves the reader feeling that they have experienced a whole life. A series of deceptively simple images connect to reveal that life. The story opens thus: “My heart – I thought it stopped. So I got in my car and headed for God” (3). The narrator discovers that church is not the optimum space for one to hear the beating of one’s heart and recover one’s sense of identity. When she returns home, she sees an empty pot in her garden filled with rainwater. This reminds her of a birdbath, which in turn recalls a concrete-mixing tub from her past. As a girl, she would sneak out at night, slide the tub out to sea and sit in it, “hearing nothing, for hours” (4). Three banal objects acquire enormous power. By connecting these images, the reader recognises the thread that has shaped the narrator’s life: a quest for peace and security, a space of her own, in which she can hear her heart beat and revel in being alive. The final section takes place in the narrator’s bathroom. She runs water into the tub, where, she claims, she is best positioned to recover this inner peace: by immersing yourself in the water, she tells us, you can enjoy the “playfulness of your heart” (4).
“In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried” is the first story Hempel wrote for Lish. It is based on her experience of witnessing the illness and death of her friend, Jessica Wolfson, to whom she had promised a story. When the narrator visits the hospital, she is introduced to the nurse as “The Best Friend”. Her friend has been there for two months and this is the narrator’s first visit: until this point, she has not “dared to look any closer” (Reasons 40, 41). She is now, she tells us, “doing it” and “hoping that I will live through it” (41). The patient asks the narrator to keep her entertained with anecdotes; they get through the visiting hours amusing each other with puns and gallows humour. The narrator struggles to come to terms with her friend’s illness and imminent death: she notices that the “experts had stopped saying if and now spoke of when” and wishes that her friend could be “afraid” with her (44, Hempel’s italics). Hempel captures the complex feelings of the visiting narrator with powerful candour: when she returns to the hospital after a break, she sees that a second bed has appeared in her friend’s room and reflects: “She wants every minute […] She wants my life”. When she does leave the hospital, she feels “weak and small and failed. Also exhilarated” (46, 48). When her friend dies, the narrator thinks about the “things that will figure in the retelling”: as well as recalling various details of her friend’s final days, she admits that “[i]t is just possible I will say I stayed the night”. She asks herself: “And who is there that can say that I did not?” (50). This concern with the ethics of storytelling and the slippery nature of “the truth” would become a major theme of Hempel’s work.
Reasons to Live was very well received, with critics recognising the arrival of a major new voice in short fiction. Sheila Ballantyne of the New York Times praised the unity of some of the stories, noting that they have the power to “take your breath away, so in tune are their resolutions with everything that has gone before”. Ballantyne also noted the authenticity of Hempel’s portrayal of California, the main setting of the collection: “The details are perfectly rendered, quintessential California cliches; and yet they are also the truth”.
In his introduction to Hempel’s Collected Stories, writer Rick Moody highlights the particular qualities of “Hempel sentences”, noting how they work to express deep “longing” and “profound disquiet” (xii). Of Hempel’s debut collection he writes: “In Reasons to Live, one had a sense that the author really was trying to use sentences to save lives, because there were so many memorable, quotable sentences hiding in the occasionally inscrutable fragments of life contained therein” (xii, Moody’s italics). Hempel has stated of the collection:
The whole book is true. I am really interested in resilience. There was a period in my life - my 20s were miserable - when every other day there was some horrible tragedy. In less than a year, there were two suicides in my family and I was in two very serious accidents. Dr. Christiaan Barnard said, ‘Suffering isn’t ennobling, recovery is.’ If I have a motto for this particular bunch of stories, that’s what it is.
Hempel’s second short-story collection was published in 1990 again to great acclaim. It offers further exploration of the impact of loss, be it a lover or a body part, and the state of limbo in which many human beings frequently find themselves. The characters wait for moments of enlightenment or at least relief, pulling themselves through disappointments and catastrophes with humour. The collection abounds with moments that illuminate life’s absurdity. In “Rapture of the Deep” the narrator is an agency worker who has been chosen to handle trick-or-treat duties for a woman with a bad back. Miss Locey, the patient, takes solace in performing a series of “comic take[s]” for the narrator (Collected 125): she tells her that when she thought she was pregnant she made a deal with God that in return for getting her period she would “do exercises for the rest of my life”. When her period arrives and she is compelled to fulfil her part of the deal, she mounts the exercise bike “and right away threw out my back” (Collected 124). Miss Locey wears a range of rings on her fingers and tells the narrator what each gem represents: her favourite, topaz, is supposed to provide consolation to the wearer in various ways and is the chosen stone of “mariners without a moon” (126). Hempel reveals the narrator’s loneliness in two sentences: “That’s when I felt I should have been born in the topaz month. ‘Used by mariners without a moon’” (126). The narrator tells Miss Locey that she lost her fiancé to a scuba-diving accident and that she is waiting for God to account for this: “An explanation would not be enough. An apology would not be enough. I needed for that God to look up to me, I said. I needed for him to have to tilt his head way back to look up to me, exposing his throat” (127).
Accidents and near-misses are a feature of the collection. Hempel draws from her life again in “The Harvest”, a story about the impact of a serious car accident on a woman who likes to edit and embellish her accounts. At one point the narrator steps out of her story to note: “I leave a lot out when I tell the truth. The same when I write a story. I’m going to tell you now what I left out of “The Harvest”, and maybe begin to wonder why I had to leave it out” (Collected 106). She reveals the original title of the story – “Marriageability” – and tells us that most details of the “first story” were incorrect, such as how many stitches she had and the fact that she was on a motorcycle with a single man and not in a car with a married man when the accident occurred. The narrator admits that her storytelling decisions are often based on her preconceptions of readerly responses: “But when you thought he had a wife, wasn’t I liable to do anything? And didn’t I have it coming?” (108). The details that were “true” all along take on further resonance in the context of all the changes: for example, in both accounts of the accident, the narrator, having suffered a terrible leg injury, asks the man she is dating if looks matter. Both times he responds: “Not at first” (104, 108). Moody admires the metafictional dimension of this story; Hempel is “doing a merry dance of destruction on the grave of realistic fiction” (xiv).
In his review of At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, Robert Towers argues that the label of “minimalist” is misleading in relation to Hempel’s work and suggest “miniaturist” instead: Hempel’s fiction “is marked not by spareness of treatment or the absence of affect or motivation but rather by an almost miraculous exactitude of observation and execution”. The issue of formal labels resurfaces: noting that some of the stories in the collection stretch to only two pages and are “hardly stories in any traditional sense”, Towers writes that “to call them sketches or fragments is to overlook the elegance and compactness of their style and the unsettling impact of the feelings conveyed”.
Hempel’s third collection marked a departure in terms of form: Tumblehome: a Novella and Stories features her longest fictional work to date, the novella that gives the entire collection its title. As several reviewers noted, the vexed notion of a “home” ties the narratives together. The shortest story, “Housewife”, comprises a single sentence reporting that a woman makes a habit of sleeping with both her husband and one other man within the space of a day and then spends the remaining hours “incanting, ‘French film, French film’” (221, Hempel’s italics). Hempel needs only a sentence to show us the lengths to which one woman will go to inject some glamour into her existence, even as she remains unconvinced. In “Sportsman” Jack is in the middle of a break-up and facing the prospect of losing his home. He sets out from California to stay with a doctor friend in New York. His friend’s wife, Vicki, troubles Jack because she insists on talking about emotions. As the story progresses, Jack begins to open up, both through conversation with Vicki and observation of Banker, the couple’s dog, and Boss, the neighbour’s puppy. In Hempel’s work, both animals and children offer languages and gestures that bring relief and hope to her flailing protagonists.
Reviewers generally agreed that the novella is the most impressive part of this collection. “Tumblehome” is an epistolary novella; the narrator is writing to a painter with whom she was briefly romantically involved. She is spending time in an institution, after having a breakdown: she has been assessed as a six, “according to the nurse who had devised her own scale” of suffering, which causes her to wonder who the “nines and tens” are (Collected 234, 237). “Tumblehome” might be longer than Hempel’s other works, but it shares their structural properties. The backstory of the narrator’s breakdown and the present-day narrative line unfold in pieces. We learn that her mother committed suicide and that the narrator feels as though she will “be able to live” only when she can “sleep in a position of my own – not in the way my mother’s body was found on the bed” (269). The novella ends with the narrator trying to leave the institution, where she has made some connections, but returning. Before she goes back into the building, she asks the driver to drop her off at the ocean just beyond. Hempel leaves us with an image that suggests that separation and unity can co-exist – there is comfort in being apart from the rest of the world with the other residents: the narrator sees “hundreds of tiny starfish” washed up on the beach. The ocean, she notes, “leaves them stranded in salty constellations, a sandy galaxy within reach” (301). In her review of the whole collection, Elizabeth Gleick praises Hempel’s restraint when dealing with weighty themes:
If possible, she has sliced off even finer slivers of life in “Tumble Home” than she did in her earlier minimalist collections, “Reasons to Live” and “At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom”. Writing about parenthood, about death, about breakups, she jettisons excess in the manner of a trendy architect, stripping her work to its essentials. But Hempel's stories are not about white light or clean, cold surfaces. Nor are they about being fashionable. In this instance, less really is more.
Hempel’s next collection, The Dog of the Marriage, was published in 2005. Moody notes a shift towards a more explicit exploration of human sexuality in this work; Hempel’s insight into this subject, he argues, rivals that of Mary Gaitskill (Collected xvi). “Beach Town”, the opening story, sets the tone for the collection, with the narrator watching the sexual activities of her summer neighbours. She witnesses a sexual act between the husband and another woman and later overhears the wife being comforted by her female friends. In the closing paragraph, the narrator reflects on an earlier moment of eavesdropping, where she heard the couple placing bets on whether the moon was waxing or waning. When the woman turned out to be correct, the narrator “listened for the woman to tell her husband she had won, knowing they had not named the terms of the bet, and that the woman next door would collect nothing” (Collected 307): moments of victory rarely yield the satisfaction we might expect, particularly when gender politics are at play. Moody identifies another story in the collection, “Offertory”, as “one of the most erotic stories in contemporary literature” (xviii): the story evolves from a lover’s request to the narrator to offer truthful, “fine-grained”, “plummy”, “lyric” accounts of her sexual adventures with “nuanced, subtitlized, exact” depictions of points on the body (375).
The title story explores themes familiar to Hempel’s readers, measuring up dogs against husbands. The narrator is in the process of breaking up with her husband but finds joy in her work helping to train and care for seeing-eye dogs: services that Hempel herself has performed as a volunteer. When the narrator tells her husband about the difference between humans and dogs, it becomes clear to the Hempel reader that dogs possess the qualities so often lacking in the characters of her stories: people “flatter you by wanting to know every last thing about you” but this is not “a compliment, it is just efficient, a person getting more quickly to the end of you”. Dogs, on the other hand, “do want to know every last thing about you. They take in the smell of you, they know from the next room, asleep, when a mood settles over you. The difference is there’s not an end to it” (348-9). Like many of Hempel’s characters, this narrator has vivid dreams. Her reflection that dreams are “the place most of us get what we need” could indeed be applied to most of Hempel’s protagonists. The narrator’s recurring dream sees her swimming in Lake Michigan amongst hammerhead sharks – she acknowledges that the sharks prefer warmer waters but senses that they represent the obstacles preventing her from living a life of peace and optimism, as opposed to one
where I mourn my lost status as someone who doesn’t cause problems, and prove again that life is one long medley of prayers that we are not exposed, and try to convince myself that people who seem to suffer are not, in fact, unhappy, and want to be persuaded by the Japanese poem: “The barn burned down./Now I can see the moon”. (355)
Hempel’s Collected Stories followed a year later, bringing together every story from all four collections and the novella “Tumblehome”, but no new stories. The collection was reissued in 2008 as The Dog of the Marriage: The Collected Short Stories and won the 2007 Ambassador Book Award. In their reviews critics and fellow writers marvelled at Hempel’s ability to tell the story of a life in a sentence and to inspire laughter and tears with the same moments. In his review for the Guardian, Patrick Ness notes that Hempel is “staggeringly good at opening lines” and characterises the stories as “astonishing [...] hilarious and surprising and insightful, written in prose so sharp you could cut meat with it”.
In 2015 a thriller entitled The Hand That Feeds You was published under the name of A. J. Rich. The novel was conceived by Hempel’s friend, the writer Katherine Russell Rich, who died of breast cancer in 2012. It was in its early stages when Rich died and Hempel collaborated with the writer Jill Ciment to complete it. In an article for the New York Times Alexandra Alter writes that the novel “bears little resemblance” to the “literary styles” of either Hempel or Ciment but that each of them took on a particular role when writing the novel: Ciment was the “plot architect”, while Hempel “polished the sentences”.
Sing to It was published in 2019. The collection takes a similar form to Tumblehome: several pieces of flash fiction, several short stories and one longer story or novella. In the New Yorker review, James Wood finds himself posing the same questions concerning the very brief title story that have struck critics throughout Hempel’s career: “Is it a short story, really? Or a poem?” As Wood notes, the story consists of a request from a dying man to the narrator to avoid metaphor, because “nothing is like anything else” (Sing 3): a challenge that ultimately defeats both characters. Writing for the Paris Review, Alice Blackhurst, a former student of Hempel, reveals that her teacher uttered the line “Nothing is like anything else” to a writing group in relation to the use of metaphor in fiction. The narrator repeats the line, spoken by the dying man in the story, with a difference: “No one is like anyone else” (3). As Wood observes, “This is not a story about death, that distinguished thing; it is an elegy for an irreducible person” (Wood’s italics).
The long story, “Cloudland”, concerns a woman working as a “quasi-professional” care-worker in Florida (Sing, 85). She has left Manhattan, where she worked as a teacher: while women around her were “breaking glass ceilings”, our narrator “found one firmly in place” (Sing 86). In the opening sections of the story she recalls telling herself that there will “never come a time when I will not be thinking of this”, without specifying the meaning of “this”, and confirms that she was both right and wrong (83). She wonders what happens to someone if they “do not know when something is over?” or if you “look for a sign and a sign doesn’t come. Or a sign comes but you miss it” (84). The story clarifies the nature of the “this” that continues to haunt her and the reason why she cannot be sure that it will ever be over. She returns to a pivotal time in her life when she was eighteen years old and pregnant. She was sent to a home in Maine where she gave birth and handed over her baby to her boyfriend’s parents, leaving herself with a lifetime of questions about her daughter. The story explores the familiar theme of how to cope with absence and loss. The narrator reflects: “You can shut it all down. Every last thing you defined yourself by – you can give it up, and go without, and put up a front that gets some traction. You must keep your gaze turned outward. Pay attention to others. Don’t fall back on what is waiting to take you down. Or choose to fall back on it, with arms flung out at your sides” (95, Hempel’s italics). She adopts strategies deployed by Hempel’s heroines across several collections, such as consulting psychics – she is hoping to “find one who won’t tell me the truth” (106) - and asks herself the questions that resonate throughout Hempel’s work: “What must it be like to live an ordered life” and “where does one ever feel at home?” (108, 111). Reviewers of Sing to It welcomed Hempel’s return. Elizabeth Winkler of the Wall Street Journal writes: “When there is a shock, a crisis, a scene of horror, Ms. Hempel sings to it, and the result is an exquisite collection by a master of the genre.”
In “Cloudland” the narrator wonders “which word sounds worse – ‘longing’ or ‘yearning’?” and recalls how she used both “interchangeably when they were what I felt, and felt for a long time” (Sing 90). Many commentators have identified this feeling as the dominant mood in Hempel’s work, although always tempered with wit and optimism: it is a combination that has drawn the admiration of many writers, including Moody and Chuck Palahniuk, who identifies Hempel as his “god among writers” (Collected). In his introduction to Hempel’s Collected Stories Moody places Hempel in the company of “a rather profound and cruelly underestimated lineage of women writers”, including Grace Paley, Ann Beattie, Cynthia Ozick, Alice Munro and Lydia Davis (xii). Hempel has identified one particular comment as her most treasured compliment and it is a useful one for any reader of her work: “I think my favorite compliment that I got from a writer early on”, she told the Paris Review in 2003, “was someone saying to me, ‘You leave out all the right things’. That was wonderful to hear. To know you’ve given your reader credit for being able to understand without you having to say it”.
Works Cited
Alter, Alexandra. “The Hand That Feeds You, a Thriller Written
as an Act of Love for Its Originator”. New York Times. 3
July 2015. Online.
Ballantyne, Sheila. “Rancho Libido and Other Hot Spots”. New
York Times. Rev. of Reasons to Live. 28 April 1985.
Online.
Blackhurst, Alice. “Nothing is Like Anything Else”. Paris
Review. 27 March 2019. Online.
Gleick, Elizabeth. “Of the Essence”. New York Times. Rev.
of Tumblehome: A Novella and Stories. 27 July 1997.
Online.
Hempel, Amy. “The Art of Fiction No. 176”. Interview by Paul
Winner. Paris Review 166. Summer 2003. Online.
---. The Dog of the Marriage: Collected Stories. 2008.
London: Quercus, 2009.
---. Reasons to Live. New York: Harper, 1985.
---. Sing to It: Stories. 2019. New York: Scribner.
Moody, Rick. “On Amy Hempel”. Collected Stories of Amy
Hempel. xi-xix.
Ness, Patrick. “Choreography for Canines”. Rev. of The Dog of
the Marriage: the Collected Stories of Amy Hempel.
Guardian. 22 March 2008. Online.
Towers, Robert. “Don’t Expect Too Much of Men”. Rev. of At the
Gates of the Animal Kingdom. New York Times. 11 March
1990. Online.
Winkler, Elizabeth. “‘Sing to It’ Review: Moments of Being”.
Wall Street Journal. 22 March 2019. Online.Wood, James.
“Keeping Up with Amy Hempel”. Rev. of Sing to It. New
Yorker. Online. 25 March 2019.
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Citation: Lister, Rachel. "Amy Hempel". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 30 August 2021 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=14766, accessed 21 November 2024.]
