Choosing a favorite Hempel story was also challenging for me; there are just so, so many options. In the end, I went with ‘Tumble Home,’ which may or may not be a novella. Its inclusion in The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel certainly would allow us then to call it a story, regardless. ‘Tumble Home’ takes the form of a letter written from a psychiatric rehabilitation center; a letter to a man, a painter the writer briefly met before her breakdown. The letter is an attempt to express the inexpressible, the pursuit of which, we are given to believe, may have been what caused said breakdown in the first place. The structural bones of this story are fairly simple — it doesn’t get much more straightforward than an address — but Hempel chisels from marble, and what we get is an exquisite portrait of a woman who, like the narrator in Beattie’s ‘The Burning House’ is desperate to be understood by the object of her affection.
First published in Hempel’s collection Tumble Home, Scribner, 1998, and collected in The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel, Scribner, 2006
A Personal Anthology 