"In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried" by Amy Hempel

1.12.22

I’m not caught up yet, though I started writing this yesterday. IAre you caught up? I don’t expect you to be. But I do urge you to read Miranda July’s beautiful story “Roy Spivey” so you can tell me what you thought in tomorrow’s comments.

Before sitting down to write this tonight I was listening to a compilation of Fresh Air interviews with Joan Didion. Didion said she likes things as uncomplicated as possible so she can focus on her writing. I still remember the transcendent experience of reading The Year of Magical Thinking, which came out shortly after my mom died by suicide. She got it. I felt seen. In the years after, I pored over everything she wrote; her essays and novels. Everything. In 2012, two years after my mom’s death, I was totally untethered, floating without family or much support at all. I moved briefly to Sonoma County with a long-lost relative who lived in an old barn house. My bedroom had been a chicken coop at one point.

I took a job at a farm in Marin County, ri…