This short story is a paragraph long and captures Davis’ exceptional minimalist craft. I read it in The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis in the summer following my first year at university. Moving from a Northern working-class village to enrol on an English Literature and Creative Writing course in an unfamiliar city, I felt like an imposter. I was close to leaving and returning home to work at a bar that I loved. A bar which held weekly open mics, where people from all walks of life shared stories that felt to me so honest, so far from pretence. I hadn’t really felt connected to the literature studied during the course, but a tutor I admired gave me this text, and as I read, I felt that maybe I could do this writing (and university) thing. Davis’ stories are complex and intelligent, though they are also subtle and highly relatable. Her minute observations on being human in all of its joy, humour and tragedy, are exceptional. In her story, ‘Fear’, a woman runs from her house calling:
“‘Emergency, emergency,’ and one of us runs to her and holds her until her fears are calmed. We know she is making it up; nothing has really happened to her. But we understand, because there is hardly one of us who has not been moved to do just what she has done, and every time, it has taken all our strength, and even the strength of our friends and families, too, to quiet us.”
Events in Davis’ short-short fiction may seem small and inconsequential, though it is within these snapshots that she pulls together those intricate moments that compose our daily lives. Still, when I struggle with my writing, I go back time and time again to this collection feeling similarly seen, understood and whole-heartedly inspired.
First published in Conjunctions 24, Spring 1995, and available to read online here; collected in Almost No Memory, FSG, 1997. Included in The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, FSG/Hamish Hamilton, 2009
A Personal Anthology 