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Apr 25, 2024 · The group enjoyed a naked birthday cake, custom made for Kourtney by her friend Jessica Wolfson, with the birthday girl saying on Instagram, "I have the best friends."
Jessica Wolfson is an award winning documentary director and producer. Her work has been broadcast on PBS, IFC, Discovery Channel, TLC, and played film festivals such as Sundance, Tribeca, SXSW, DocNYC, Full Frame and more.
- Author Biography
- Plot Summary
- Characters
- Themes
- Style
- Historical Context
- Critical Overview
- Criticism
- Sources
- Further Reading
Born December 14, 1951, in Chicago, Illinois, Amy Hempel moved to San Francisco as a teenager and attended several California colleges during an academic career that saw frequent interruptions. Deciding to become a writer, she settled in New York City and attended Columbia University where her creative writing instructor was Gordon Lish, a noted no...
The story opens with the unnamed narrator visiting her friend, who is also unnamed, in a hospital near Hollywood, California, where the friend is dying, presumably of cancer. The friend asks the narrator to “tell me things I won’t mind forgetting.” The things the narrator tells her friend are funny and light, items of trivia about the first tape re...
Dying Friend
This unnamed woman is the friend whom the narrator visits in the hospital. Her request to the narrator to “tell me things I won’t mind forgetting,” sets the story in motion. The woman was the narrator’s best friend, but her feeling of betrayal is revealed when she introduces the narrator to her nurse as “the Best Friend.” The woman is making a concerted effort to deal with her mortality, illustrated by her attempt to engage her friend in a conversation about Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s theory of...
Narrator
The main character in “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” is the unnamed narrator who relates the story in first person. While paying a long-overdue visit to a dying friend in the hospital, the narrator muses about her shame and guilt in neglecting a friend in need. Though the narrator seems aware of her fear of death, her fear prevents her from discussing the topic openly. Instead, she seems fixated on grotesque images, like earthquakes and a man who dies of fright after seeing his m...
“In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” begins with the narrator’s reluctant visit to a dying friend but evolves into an elegy for the terminally-ill woman and a confession of the narrator’s own fear of dying.
Narrative Voice
“In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” is told in the first-person point of view by an unidentified female narrator. At times the voice telling this story seems to move into a narrative technique known as stream-of consciousness—the literary attempt to reproduce the pattern of a mind in unchecked thought, simultaneously moving in multiple levels of awareness, issuing an uninterrupted flow of sensations, thoughts, memories, associations, and reflections. This is shown in part by her quest...
Setting
Symbolic in the story’s Southern California setting is the idea that the narrator’s situation is merely a play or a television show in which she is acting. The hospital, which is near Hollywood, is likened to the one on the television series “Marcus Welby, MD,” and a camera guards the sick woman’s room. Conscious that she is being filmed, the narrator states “I had my audience,” in further recognition of the metaphor. Her tales about insignificant things take on the aura of a performance. “Of...
Black Humor
Black humor is comedy of a situational or conversational nature that concentrates on morose
California in the 1980s
Hempel’s writing, particularly her stories in Reasons to Live, evoke a lifestyle that is Californian in nature. Despite the fact that they were written in New York, most of her stories take place on the West coast, including “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried.” Hempel frequently uses cultural references as touchstones for her readers, knowing they will understand what a “Marcus Welby” hospital looks like, or that country singer Tammy Wynette recorded a song called “Stand by Your Man.”...
“In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” was frequently cited by critics as one of Hempel’s strongest stories in her first collection, Reasons to Live. In discussing her sparse, minimalist style, critics often pointed to details in the story like the metaphor of a Hollywood set as the forum for a discussion on death. Discussing the book as a who...
Judy Sobeloff
Judy Sobeloff is a writer and educator who has won several awards for her fiction. In the following essay, she discusses the aspects of minimalism inherent in “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried.” What is most striking about “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried,” widely considered one of Amy Hempel’s finest and most moving stories, is its compression and its pain. The writing here is terse; much is left out. The parts left out are what give the story its emotional power. This sam...
What Do I Read Next?
1. At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom,Hempel’s second collection of short stories, which includes the well-received story about writing stories, “Harvest.” 2. Less than Zero,Bret Easton Ellis’s 1985 novel about youth in California, whose unexamined lives have tragic consequences. 3. “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” Katherine Anne Porter’s 1929 story about a dying woman troubled by her past; written in first-person, stream-of-consciousness narrative. 4. Will You Please Be Quiet, Please ?, t...
Robert Peltier
Robert Peltier is an English instructor at Trinity College and has published works of both fiction and nonfiction. In the following essay, he discusses the nature of truth as it is regarded by the characters in this “postmodern” story, ultimately stating that the narrator’s belief in her “language of grief’ is a lie. Beneath the wisecracking humor and even beneath the despair and fear in Amy Hempel’s “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried,” there is a deeper bleakness that is both dangero...
Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast,Macmillan, 1964. Kakutani, Michiko. “Uphill Battles,” The New York Times,April 13, 1985, p. 14. Kubler-Ross, Elisabeth. On Death and Dying,Macmillan, 1969. Saltzman, Arthur M. “To See a World in a Grain of Sand: Expanding Literary Minimalism,” Contemporary Literature,Vol. XXXI, no. 4, 1990, pp. 423-33. Schumacher...
Aldridge, John W. Talents and Technicians: Literary Chic and the New Assembly-Line Fiction,Scribner’s, 1992. Hallett, Cynthia J. Whitney. “Minimalism—The Short Story.” Dissertation, University of South Florida, 1996. Hooper, Brad. “Adult Fiction” BooklistVol. 86, No. 13, March 1, 1990, p. 1264. Jenks, Tom. “How Writers Live Today.” Esquire,Vol. 104...
Jessica Wolfson is known for Life & Life (2021), The Paint Wizzard (2020) and Kinderland (2021).
- Producer, Additional Crew, Director
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View the profiles of people named Jessica Wolfson. Join Facebook to connect with Jessica Wolfson and others you may know. Facebook gives people the power...
In their new documentary film Radio Unnameable, Paul Lovelace and Jessica Wolfson tell Fass’ story by utilizing a treasure trove of archival material, interviews and audio (which is constantly updated and can be sampled here).
Oct 27, 2021 · In July, 2019, the documentary filmmakers Jessica Wolfson and Jessie Auritt met Millicent McCrory, a local housepainter, for lunch on the south side of Austin, Texas; they had heard about...
