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A review by chiyeungreads
Reasons to Live by Amy Hempel
5.0
They say if you want to learn how to write, you should read Amy Hempel. Whoever said this wasn’t wrong; I was blown away by this collection and I will be reading this again and again.
There are so many gems:
“She laughs, and I cling to the sound the way someone dangling above a ravine holds fast to the thrown rope.”
“Here’s a trick I found for how to finally get some sleep. I sleep in my husband’s bed. That way the empty bed I look at is my own.”
While some compare her to Carver, I enjoyed reading her stories much more. She tackles loss, love and death with much more wit and humanity, yet intertwined with that is a sense of yearning and heart ache that you feel with every sentence. In that way she reminds me of Denis Johnson more so than Carver; there is a empathy I feel for all of her characters, something that I never felt for Carver’s.
Hempel’s stories are short but they’re thousand piece puzzles that require attentive reading; stories like Celia is back took me a few rereads to fully understand. She never outright explains anything, and you really have to read in between the lines.
My favorite stories from the collection:
San Francisco
In the cemetery where Al Jolson is buried
Beg, Sl Tog, Inc, Cont, Rep
The man in Bogota
There are so many gems:
“She laughs, and I cling to the sound the way someone dangling above a ravine holds fast to the thrown rope.”
“Here’s a trick I found for how to finally get some sleep. I sleep in my husband’s bed. That way the empty bed I look at is my own.”
While some compare her to Carver, I enjoyed reading her stories much more. She tackles loss, love and death with much more wit and humanity, yet intertwined with that is a sense of yearning and heart ache that you feel with every sentence. In that way she reminds me of Denis Johnson more so than Carver; there is a empathy I feel for all of her characters, something that I never felt for Carver’s.
Hempel’s stories are short but they’re thousand piece puzzles that require attentive reading; stories like Celia is back took me a few rereads to fully understand. She never outright explains anything, and you really have to read in between the lines.
My favorite stories from the collection:
San Francisco
In the cemetery where Al Jolson is buried
Beg, Sl Tog, Inc, Cont, Rep
The man in Bogota