Story Sunday: Amy Hempel's “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is ...
Amy Hempel’s “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried” is a story steeped in the language of grief, although the narrator seems hardly capable of acknowledging that grief, or its accompanying guilt. Not just the guilt of not having done enough for her dying friend, but of not wanting to have done enough for her dying friend.
Hempel perfectly captures the feel of the hospital and the attempt to both accommodate the desires of the patient and normalize the situation, to act out a scene that does not have to happen in a hospital.When the narrator's friend is hungry, it makes its ice cream and a pair of playing a scene familiar to anyone who has spent a night with a friend, but here it is colored by what they were. Hempel does not grow in the catharsis or attempts to drive to an appropriate emotion, but when she writes of "men, we used to think that we wanted to sleep with" it captures in few words the feeling of youth and loss of this young, and reports for just how long these two have been together and the degree to which the narrator has no friend in the months passed without a visit.
The story had made her hungry, she said—so I took the elevator down six floors to the cafeteria, and brought back all the ice cream she wanted. We lay side by side, adjustable beds cranked up for optimal TV-viewing, littering the sheets with Good Humor wrappers, picking toasted almonds out of the gauze. We were Lucy and Ethel, Mary and Rhoda in extremis. The blinds were closed to keep light off the screen.
We watched a movie starring men we used to think we wanted to sleep with. Hers was a tough cop out to stop mine, a vicious rapist who went after cocktail waitresses.
“This is a good movie,” she said when snipers felled them both.
I missed her already.
today's Story Sunday: Amy Hempel's “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried”
Story Sunday: Amy Hempel's “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried” Amy Hempel In The Cemetery - Bookshelf
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Line Breaks: "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried" by ...
Ray Carver called Amy Hempel some pretty good names, including "a precisionist. ... Here is what Amy had to say about "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried," now on ...
"In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried" by Amy Hempel ...
"Tell me things I won't mind forgetting," she said. "Make it useless stuff or skip it. ... On the the morning she was moved to the cemetery, the one where Al Jolson is buried, I ...
Amy Hempel - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hempel was born in Chicago, Illinois. She lives in New York and is ... Both "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried" and Tumble Home highlight animals' ...
Amy Hempel Biography
In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried. by Amy Hempel. eNotes Home > Literature > In the ... Born December 14,1951, in Chicago, Illinois, Amy Hempel moved to San Francisco ...
In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried Study Guide - Amy ...
In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried study guide with summary, notes, essays, quotes, analysis and pictures