Ephemera: My Famous Babysitter
Proof Amy Hempel was Right
In her story The Harvest Amy Hempel devotes the second half to listing all the details she omitted from the first. So many true things occur as too coincidental to be believed. So ultimately even the truth must be blunted or diluted if it’s to have any credibility. To me, this is a creeping mundanity from television — where the stories must be kept dull and predictable so the commercials will shine1.
Our threshold for the incredible is rising rapidly. By denying and censoring the actual amazing things that happen, we lose sight of how varied-yet-connected our lives really are.
A student of mine tends bar in Tacoma, Washington and tells me that locals all play the same game when they get together. To break the ice, they all compare their relationships to Ted Bundy and his family or anything Ted Bundy-adjacent. In the small farming town of Burbank, Washington, where I grew up, many of the original families hired the same teenage babysitter. She later moved to Los Angeles and got into pictures. She married a rising movie director. Not long before her first child was due she was killed.
Until now I’ve never written about her — about playing on the backyard grass with her on hot summer vacation days — because to tell those stories destroyed my credibility. This next week, those stories will all come out. For better or worse. As always, my hat is off to Amy Hempel for showing us that our television-blunted expectations about “real” life have blinded us to how incredibly spectacular2 life actually is.
To most writers, fiction is more about dulling down the truth than it is about inventing the incredible. The “unbelievable” exists all around us.
If You’re Up for Exploring More…
You know. Like choosing ugly bridesmaids to make the bride look prettier.
Absurdist existentialism comes much closer to reality than so-called “realism.” More on that to come in a future post.
If this isn’t what I’ve been talking about than— I dunno! Hahaa. This is why, as a kid, no one believed me when I told “stories!” I swear, I couldn’t make up the things that have happened to me!
For example… I was listening to a podcast where Chuck was being interviewed and he mentioned the box of porn that would be just left in the middle of the woods— then, other people had that in common. I was one of them! I thought, how strange is that to have that found item in common with other people! However, the story attached to it and how it changed lives of us kids that found it— that part wasn’t fun and kindah ruined all our Summer and was the end of our innocent childhoods. Later, I found out who it belonged to and how it got there. Some of it had been burned and the kids were even trying to save some of those burnt images of naked people… seriously, you can’t make this up!
Thank you for bringing this up—- also, how WOULD anyone believe you if you said that?! I get it!!
Thanks for giving us more diamonds.
Also, I’m reading my first Tom Spanbauer novel, “The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon.” One chapter in… wow!
>To most writers, fiction is more about dulling down the truth than it is about inventing the >incredible
It is so true bc all those amazing stories that did happen to me were way more intense experiences than I or anyone could make them out to be with any description/telling... Maybe when I tell them to my friends, I can make them almost as grapping as they were to me at the moment, but it's always a bit less... And even less when those are written down for strangers.
Just sth all of us have to accept in order to do the writing with less regrets, less hesitation or less anxiety.