Amy Hempel’s “Pool Night”
The death wish waiting
This is First Breath—one paragraph, up close, every Friday.
I’m KKP. If you’re a writer or reader who cares about what happens at the level of the sentence, please consider subscribing. Share if you know somebody else who’d be into it.
The Book
There are writers I love, and then there are the writers that I think about the same way I think about my family and a handful of friends who know exactly who they are: like they are just a permanent settled fact of my interior. Amy Hempel is one of those. It’s like her sentences are in my bloodstream. Her impossible compression, her precision, and the way she can set two plain words next to each other and the space between them rings. I’ve spent tons of time trying to understand how she does it, and I’m not really any closer (but I’ve never once been bored by the trying).
I’ve been circling Hempel since I started this newsletter, the way you circle the deep end before you’re ready to go under. Every Friday I’d think, this week, and every Friday I’d lose my nerve and write about somebody else. She’s foundational for me in a way that makes her hard to talk about.
Reasons to Live, her 1985 debut, came out of Gordon Lish’s workshop (if you can call it a workshop, he doesn’t!), and decades later I sat in a version of that same room with the same man, learning the same impossible thing. That the sentence is the unit of attention, that you build forward by sound. The collection was a splash when it landed (that spare, startling new voice) but the strange thing is how much more famous it's gotten since, the reputation still compounding decades on. It’s on the “1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die” list, and it’s been taught in every program that takes the sentence seriously. Alan Cheuse, in the Chicago Tribune, said “San Francisco” was “arguably the finest short story composed by any living writer.” The Guggenheim, the PEN/Malamud, the rest of the official love came later, the way it does, once the prizes caught up to what Hempel had been doing for years. “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” (the story everybody knows, the one in all the anthologies) was the first story she ever wrote, for an assignment to put down your secret shame. I teach Hempel (and shame!) constantly, and watching a student really get it is watching the method move one more seat down the table Lish sat us all at, decades apart.
The last line of “In the Cemetery” is on my arm. It was my first tattoo—I got it before I’d published anything, back when Hempel was purely a hero and not yet, improbably, a friend. I think it might be the best last line of anything, ever, and I’m only half kidding when I tell you its existence has me plotting a whole other Substack project someday, just about endings (Denis Johnson’s “Work” would be on that list too, so would Barry Hannah’s “Water Liars.” First Breath —> Last Gasp? Who knows).
I'd been reading her since I was 19, and as soon as I sold my first book, a collection, I knew I would do the completely unhinged thing: I messaged her cold to ask for a blurb. I wasn’t even really expecting her to respond, but here’s something my wonderful agent has instilled in me: don’t ask, don’t get. All anyone can say is no—or, even less sting, nothing at all. Amazingly, Hempel responded with an address where I could send an advance copy (turns out we had a mutual friend, Carrie, who had mentioned my tattoo, which definitely didn’t hurt my chances!). For the days it was in transit I tracked the FedEx like a lunatic, refreshing the little map. Then it happened all at once, or close enough that I can't reconstruct the order now: she read it, she wrote a beautiful blurb, and then, in a magazine where she was making the case for reading debuts, she pulled my galley out of her bag and said I was “funny and badass.” Then, she agreed to be my convo partner in NYC (asked again/got again—it really works). Before my launch at Books Are Magic, we met at a bar across the street and drank Diet Cokes, and I sat there astonished by her warm brilliance, wanting desperately to record our conversation or at least take notes (don’t worry, I didn’t), and then we went over and had a conversation about my book, in front of some of my favorite people. It’s not always the best idea to meet your heroes (ask me how I know) but occasionally they turn out to be so kind it puts a little glow on the rest of your life.
Everybody teaches “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried.” I do too—and I love it, obviously, enough to make it a permanent part of my temporary body. But the Hempel I want to talk about today is “Pool Night,” a story that has taken me apart the same way every time for twenty-odd years. People throw around the term minimalism like it means a writer working with less—less feeling, less to give. With Hempel, that has it exactly backwards. Her favorite compliment, she once told the Paris Review, came from a writer who said, “You leave out all the right things.” She loved that for the trust puts in the reader's hand, and as a reader I love my side of the bargain—the blank that she leaves me is the one I fill with the best or worst thing I can conjure, usually both, so that the strongest moment in the story is one she didn't write (and the one I didn't know I was capable of). What Hempel cuts is still there in the text, under pressure. Every omission just packs the feeling down harder.
“Pool Night” is a constellation of images orbiting a center the narrator won’t name. Her house is burning, and she's led out without trying to save a thing. That pulls her back fifteen years, to a flood that hit her hometown on what would have been Pool Night at the Club—the night the neighborhood stood on their patios and watched the city go black, a flash like a strobe each time the flood snapped another high-tension tower and the wires hit the water. In the wreckage of that flood live the Wintons: Dr. Winton, who drank down most of his liquor cabinet rather than evacuate and had to be hauled out by the Red Cross; his wife Bunny, who happily ordered new living room furniture the next morning and made the nightly news with the chyron spelling VICTIM across her chest; and their son Grey, a junior lifeguard so beautiful that girls saved his chewed gum. Grey is a clown diver (he’s part of a troupe called the“Aquazaniacs”) who does pratfalls off the high dive. To perfect a stunt for the next Pool Night, he soaks his clothes in the pool, climbs out, and then douses them with gasoline (he explains that wet cloth pulls the fuel off the skin). Then he strikes a lighter and dives back in as a human torch while the narrator films it. She sees the trick exactly once, which is all the times he does it. “I made those seconds live,” he tells her.
Here’s how it starts:
The Paragraph
This time it happened with fire. Just the way it happened before, the time it happened with water. Someone was losing everything—to water, to fire—and not trying not to.
What’s Happening
“This time it happened with fire.”
The first words are already doing something underhanded. This time. Not “one time,” not “once,” but this time, which means there were other times, which means we have walked in on a serial event. And then it happened. What is “it”? She won’t say. The pronoun has no antecedent and never gets one. We get the instrument instead: with fire. That’s the whole catastrophe. Not “my house was on fire,” not “I was losing my home.” It happened with fire.
“Just the way it happened before, the time it happened with water.”
Now the comparison the first sentence promised arrives, and watch how Hempel draws it: it happened again, and then it happened a third time. Fire and water are a matched pair. It happened with fire / happened with water, fifteen years apart. There’s still no person in the sentence, just “it.”
If you say these two sentences out loud, you can hear the King James cadence. It has the gravity of a pronouncement, like a line from Genesis or Revelation. It’s as if the catastrophe is being narrated from somewhere above the catastrophe.
Once we’re in that register, the fire and the water stop being a house fire and a flood, and instead they become the two ways the world ends. Water the first time (the Flood, Noah, the world drowned and started over) and fire the next: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time,” the spiritual Baldwin took his title from. Hempel’s narrator has lived through both kinds of disaster, both of God’s endings, in her ordinary life. The two disasters casually carry the weight of the apocalypse, and the phrasing reaches for the end of everything.
This is the move I call The Giveaway when I teach it, the first line that hands over the whole story’s terms. The biggest thing Hempel gives us is the thing she never says out loud. “It” happened (with fire, with water) but the disaster itself goes unnamed, the way the oldest and most dangerous names go unsaid.
“Someone was losing everything—to water, to fire—and not trying not to.”
Someone. Not “I.” The narrator is in her own burning house and she refers to herself third person, completely dissociated, like she’s watching it on the nightly news. Someone is losing everything. Then the dashes open and the elements come back reversed (to water, to fire) so that across three sentences the order runs fire, water, water, fire.
Listen to what changes inside the mirror. The first two times, it's with (“happened with fire,” “happened with water”) the preposition that makes the element a tool. The third time, it's to (“losing everything to water, to fire.” To is the preposition of surrender, you lose something to a force. So when fire and water come back reversed, they aren’t just the instruments of what happened to her, but the recipients of what she's giving up. She's gone from bystander to participant, and the grammar concedes to what she's about to admit.
Then we reach the clause that should be carved over the door of this whole book: “and not trying not to.” You could almost miss it if you aren’t careful. Not trying not to. She’s losing everything and making no effort to stop it. Hempel could have written “and not trying to save any of it.” She buries it in a double negative instead, so that you have to do the math yourself, and the math is the horror. What the paragraph won’t name isn’t the fire but the part of her that won’t reach for the fire extinguisher. It’s the dark will toward loss, the pull toward your own undoing that you can’t explain. That’s the real “it,” and it’s too dangerous to say plainly. She folds it into a double negative and trusts us to unfold it.
We know everything about this narrator now. Sure, we don’t know her name, or her face, or what room she’s standing in. We know the shape of her catastrophe and her relationship to it, which is the only thing that matters: she is losing everything, and some part of her—a not-small part!—is letting it all go. Reasons to Live: a title held over a cast of people who have misplaced every last reason, who are losing everything and not trying not to. You start the collection taking the title at its word, but a few stories in, you realize it was never in earnest. I t names the one thing all these people can't find.
Acoustics
Happened...happened...happened. It’s the verb of catastrophe. Hempel could have varied it (occurred, came, struck, a thesaurus's worth of ways not to say the same word twice) and a lesser writer would have, proud of the range. But the repetition is the meaning and disasters recur, so the word recurs.
Time...time. “This time” and “the time it happened with water.” Time gets said twice in the opening breath of a story that turns out to be entirely about time. Dr. Winton’s “problem is the past,” and his son Grey says “what’s coming is the thing I’m looking out for.”
It...it...it...it. Four times, the pronoun with nothing behind it. The refusal to name the disaster is structural. Every “it” is a small act of looking away.
Now the elements, and the shape they make. Fire (sentence one), water (sentence two), then water, fire (sentence three). Fire-water-water-fire. A chiasmus (ABBA) and Hempel sets the reversal literally inside a pair of dashes, as if the sentence reached up and flipped its own image in a mirror. The two disasters cross and become each other, making you feel that it’s all one disaster.
Hard little t‘s tick all the way through (time, it, time, not, not, to) in a dry deadpan. It’s the sound of someone narrating her own ruin without raising her voice. Against them, the s‘s come in soft on the last sentence, Someone was losing. The hiss enters exactly when the human does. And listen to the very end. Not, not. Those wide-open “ah” sounds, each one guillotined by that hard final t. And then to: the same open mouth, but no closing consonant this time.
Underneath the tapping are the words losing and trying. These are the paragraph’s only gerunds, and they come in at the same time the human does, told in the tense of a thing that’s still happening. She doesn’t say she lost everything. She says she was losing it. Even her refusal (“not trying not to”) is suspended in an ongoing present.
The first sentence is six words long, then the second is double that at twelve, then the third is the last and longest, with dashes torquing it open. The paragraph widens as it goes, and the widest part is where the person finally appears. She builds the room and then, at the back of it, lets you see the body standing in it.
Why I Love It
This is usually the part where I tell you what to steal. So here’s the note I write in the margins of student stories more than any other: you don’t have to name it.
When a story is about something enormous (a death, a leaving, a wanting you’re ashamed of) the instinct is to walk up to it and point. To write I was devastated, or I wanted to disappear, to give the reader the feeling pre-chewed. Hempel does the opposite, which is always braver and more stylish. She doesn’t have to say her narrator wanted to be destroyed. She gives us “not trying not to” and trusts us to climb down into the double negative and find the death wish waiting at the bottom. The reader who does that work owns the discovery in a way no stated emotion could ever give them. You feel it because you’re the one who finds it.
But (and this is important!) withholding only works when there’s something underneath to withhold. An unsteady writer leaves things out because the page was thin to begin with. Hempel leaves things out (the right things) because there's so much more she could say. You can feel the difference instantly. “It” is a withheld noun, but the withholding is unbearable because we can feel the weight of what’s behind it. If you’re going to leave the room dark, there’s gotta really be something in the dark.
At the end of the story, after the narrator’s house has burned, after she’s finally understood at last why old Dr. Winton sat drinking in his flooding home rather than walk out the door, we get, “Nothing looks worth the bother, not even your life.” The first paragraph was already full of this feeling we see at the end. “Not trying not to” and “nothing looks worth the bother” are the same impulse, years and pages apart.
The last lines of my favorite stories always send me back to the first, where it turns out the whole thing was sitting in plain sight, patient, waiting. This narrator gives it immediately away. Fire, then water, then everything lost to both, and no one trying to stop it. It's the same fusion as Grey on the board, fire and water made into one thing.
If this piece mattered to you, subscribing is the best way to say so. Several First Breaths are always free—so there's plenty to read on the house. Everything else lives in the archive for paid subscribers, which at this point is basically the syllabus I've been teaching from for years, one paragraph at a time. Paid subscriptions fund the unreasonable hours these take. It genuinely means the world!
A hint for next week: a first paragraph that pretends to be about learning a vocabulary word and is actually about the exact moment a woman's life starts to go wrong
Couple of announcements:
Free shit alert! Two things over at The Fountain: the Opportunity Calendar, our running roundup of contests, residencies, fellowships, and other submission windows worth your time—the stuff that’s easy to miss and awful to find scattered across forty tabs. And The Writing Hours, our monthly show-up-and-write session—first Friday of the month, 10am-noon PT. Bring whatever you’re avoiding. We keep each other company and actually get words down. Both of these things are totally freeee.
Free-ish signed book alert 💗 Here's something that happens once a hardcover has been out for two years: it gets remaindered. All future print runs go to paperback, meaning they're not making any more of these—meaninggg I was able to buy out the last of the hardcover stock from Knopf at a deeeep discount. I posted this in notes and the offer was supposed to end July 1st, but I'm keeping it open through the weekend: every paid subscriber (at any tier) gets a signed hardcover of We Were the Universe, shipping on me. Let's connect in the DMs. And if you're already a paid subscriber and want one, just say the word—I've got you too.
If you’re in Portland: I’m doing an event with Mac Crane at Powell’s on Tuesday July 28 at 7pm. A brilliant collection called Perverts will surely be a filthy, fun convo. Come see us!
Thank you so much for reading. I’m Kimberly King Parsons—my debut story collection Black Light was longlisted for the National Book Award, and my novel We Were the Universe won the Oregon Book Award and was a Dakota Johnson Book Club pick. I teach at Pacific University’s MFA program and I run The Fountain with Chelsea Bieker—find us for guided meditations for writers, free monthly writing hours and resources, intensives, and more.
ahh amy hempel—her deftness and compression were so formative for me. how awesome to know she’s also so kind and generous! what a great tattoo and deep dive into that paragraph. and i love “last gasp”🤣
I LOVE Amy Hempel. She is my secret mother. The pressure and not the spareness indeed!