Amy Hempel Is the Master of the Minimalist Short Story

Amy Hempel’s introduction to writing fiction was a workshop in her late 20s with Gordon Lish at Columbia University. Lish had recently left his post as the fiction editor of Esquire to become an editor at Knopf in 1977. There he continued to publish many of the writers whose careers he had launched at the magazine: Raymond Carver, Barry Hannah, and others. For his students’ first assignment, he instructed them to write about their worst secret: the thing they had done that, as he put it, “dismantles your own sense of yourself.” “Everybody knew instantly what that thing, for them, was,” Hempel recalled in an interview with The Paris Review almost 30 years later, after three spare collections of short stories—Reasons to Live (1985), At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom (1990), and Tumble Home (1997)—had established her as a star among Lish’s protégés. She continued: “We found out immediately that the stakes were very high, that we were expected to say something no one else had said, and to divulge much harder truths than we had ever told or ever thought to tell.”

The result, for Hempel, was “,” which appeared in in 1983. A narrator, who may or may not