"It wasn't quite drama, but it was energy. I don't think it was manufactured drama. It was energy. And I had that sort of interaction with my fellow editors, too… It was just a tempestuous place. A lot of big people with strong ideas butting heads. I mean, that's the nature of those sort of places. They attract people like me, and people like me don't get along with people like me."
"… To begin with, that's what I wanted to be when I was a kid. It's where I thought I was going to go, elective politics… I think that I do do that in part. I think that politics is what you make it… I go around the country and I speak. I go from high schools to political rallies. I'll speak at big fund raisers, and I do all that stuff all the time… It's interesting, but I think that what I'm trying to do is both a forensic thing-to simply dissect and point out the inadequacy of the argument on the other side, whether you're against Jerry Falwell or Pat Buchanan or whoever-and, secondly, you're doing, you're performing an exemplary role, you're saying, 'I'm also a gay person and I'm here. That very fact changes the debate we're talking about, precisely because part of what we're talking about is shame, and the capacity to resist shame and overcome it. And that is something that cannot be argued. It has to be shown. It has to be felt by people who see it for them to absorb it, and grow from it, and do it themselves. And I feel that half the time that's also what I'm doing. That I achieve ninety-five percent of what I'm doing merely by showing up. You look at them straight in the eyes… It's funny, but I was on Politically Incorrect with Lou Sheldon last week, and he said, 'I don't think it's a disease. It's a dysfunction'-talking about homosexuality-and all I did was say, 'Hey, I'm here. Stop talking about me as if I don't exist'… You can't talk about us in the same way anymore, because we're here. You have to take us seriously."
"I don't know what my role should be. I've struggled with it. You'd be amazed, the hostility I still get thrown at me… I think as soon as I held a position I'd be completely demolished by the people I'm supposed to represent… It's a very tough world out there… There is extreme resistance to that sort of leadership in the gay and lesbian world. It's a very fractious place… I hate to sound so vague and confused, but I don't know. I think we're feeling our way. I'm feeling my way."
"I'm scared of a relapse into not believing in ourselves, a relapse into thinking of ourselves as irrelevancies or shallow things, people that don't need full emotional lives, don't need full political lives-that this could return. I'm not a Whig. I don't think these things are inevitable. I think they're choices, which is why I was so keen to see marriage at least as a residue, some sort of tangible legacy of AIDS, and we haven't got it. The Hawaii result and the Alaska result show that we have so much more work to do in talking to straight people to persuade them that this is reality and that we need it and that we deserve it. And so much more to do in telling ourselves that we deserve it. And believing that we deserve it. But it's hard. It's extremely hard."
"In many ways I do feel like this book [Love Undetected] is a real attempt to draw a line under a certain part of my life and try and move on. And I didn't feel I could do that without writing it, so it had a sort of purgative effect. It probably comes across like that, too. It came up like puke. Even the abstract stuff came out like puke. It got to the point where I realized I wasn't going to finish it because I had nothing to say about friendship, for example, then I just [makes puking noise], in two weeks wrote that last thing. Just three to four hours per day just speed-writing."
"You get to a point on these things where I just need to sleep for a long time and wake up and get my life back together again before I can figure out what you write next."
"I feel like I'm saying things here that I shouldn't say. I guess it doesn't matter."
Not Chasing Amy
When you study minimalism in Tom Spanbauer's workshop, the first story you read is Amy Hempel's "The Harvest." Next you read Mark Richard's story "Strays." After that, you're ruined.
If you love books, if you love to read, this is a line you may not want to cross.
I'm not kidding. You go beyond this point, and almost every book you'll ever read will suck. All those thick, third-person, plot-driven books torn from the pages of today's news, well, after Amy Hempel, you'll save yourself a lot of time and money.
Or not. Every year on the itemized Schedule C of my tax return, I deduct more money for new copies of Hempel's three books, Reasons to Live, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, and Tumble Home. Every year, you want to share these books. What happens is they never come back. Good books never do. This is why my office shelves are crowded with nonfiction too gross for most people, mostly forensic autopsy textbooks, and a ton of novels I hate.
At a bar in New York last year, the literary bar KGB in the East Village, Hempel told me her first book is out of print. The only copy I know of is behind glass in the Powell's rare book room, a first-edition hardcover selling for $75, without a signature.
I have a rule about meeting the flesh-and-blood version of people whose work I love. That rule I'm saving for the end.
Unless Hempel's books are reprinted, I may end up spending more, or making fewer friends. You cannot not push these books on people, saying, "Read this," saying, "Is it just me, or did it make you cry, too?"
I once gave Animal Kingdom to a friend and said, "If you don't love this, we have nothing in common."
Every sentence isn't crafted, it's tortured over. Every quote and joke, what Hempel tosses out comedian-style, is something funny or profound enough you'll remember it for years. The same way, I sense, Hempel has remembered it, held on to it, saved it for a place where it could really shine. Scary jewelry metaphor, but her stories are studded and set with these compelling bits. Chocolate-chip cookies with no bland cookie "matrix," just nothing but chips and chopped walnuts.
In that way, her experience becomes your experience. Teachers talk about how students need to have an emotional breakthrough, an "ah-hah!" discovery moment in order to retain information. Fran Lebowitz still writes about the moment she first looked at a clock and grasped the concept of telling time. Hempel's work is nothing but these flashes, and every flash makes you ache with recognition.
Right now, Tom Spanbauer's teaching another batch of students by photocopying "The Harvest" from his old copy of The Quarterly, the magazine edited by Gordon Lish, the man who taught minimalism to Spanbauer and Hempel and Richard. And, through Tom, to me.
At first, "The Harvest" looks like a laundry list of details. You have no idea why you're almost weeping by the end of seven pages. You're a little confused and disoriented. It's just a simple list of facts presented in the first person, but somehow it adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Most of the facts are funny as hell, but at the last moment, when you're disarmed by laughter, it breaks your heart.
She breaks your heart. First and foremost. That evil Amy Hempel. That's the first bit Tom teaches you. A good story should make you laugh, and a moment later break your heart. The last bit is you will never write this well. You won't learn this part until you've ruined a lot of paper, wasting your free time with a pen in one hand for years and years. At any horrible moment, you might pick up a copy of Amy Hempel and find your best work is just a cheap rip-off of her worst.
To demonstrate minimalism, students sit around Spanbauer's kitchen table for ten weeks taking apart "The Harvest."