Nothing Is Like Anything Else: On Amy Hempel
This week marks the release of Amy Hempel’s Sing to It, her first book in over a decade.
In the first story I submitted to a writing workshop, I included, in my naive twenty-something state, a scene in which a male and female character get close following a party. The manuscript was a mess of overly florid metaphors, and it included the following sentence: “He touched her arm lightly.” The class’s teacher, the short-fiction writer Amy Hempel, gave it back to me swimming in black ink and annotations. “Touching isn’t cheap,” she offered gently, in response to my clunky familiarities. On the question of the metaphors she was bolder:
