Self-recovery written short and stark

NEW YORK — Amy Hempel, short story writer, is spending a rainy morning at a Madison Avenue di-ner.

She is 55 years old. Her flowing hair is silvery white. Her speech is clear but careful. She sometimes edits herself as she talks or advances her thoughts as if placing one foot slowly before the other.

For more than 20 years, she has been creating stories, short stories. She takes her time, writing out sentences in longhand, revising constantly in her head, scrubbing out excess like so many smudges on a mirror. “I’m not on deadline,” she jokes during a recent interview.

Her total work barely covers 400 pages, but the reward, beyond its own completion, has been admiration from critics and fellow writers and a growing general audience. “The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel” came out a year ago and has sold well enough — there have been nine printings, 36,000 copies in all — that a paperback has been pushed back from this spring until at least fall.

“Publishing her collected stories has made such a difference,” says Miss Hempel’s editor, Nan Graham, editor in chief of Scribner. “She never sold more than 10,000 copies of a book before. Having 36,000 in print may seem pretty modest, but it’s actually pretty amazing for an author of literary short stories.” (The collection was chosen as a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, which was won by Philip Roth for “Everyman.” Miss Hempel is scheduled to appear tonight at the award ceremony honoring the winner and four finalists at the Folger Shakespeare Library in the District.)

Life in a Hempel story can seem as stark as a Hempel sentence. She writes of accidents, death, broken marriages, lives in which dogs are the most trusted companions, the kinds of stories that make you wonder how the narrators lived to tell them.

“Nothing interests me more than finding out how someone got through something, usually a big, hard thing, but sometimes a small, awkward thing,” says Miss Hempel, who lives near the diner, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “You come up right against yourself.”

Miss Hempel’s career has been a long process of recovery and self-discovery. Some people are born writers; others, such as Miss Hempel, were driven to it. For Miss Hempel, writing is the expression and collection of a life she once feared was coming apart.

One of three siblings, she was born in Chicago and grew up in Denver and the San Francisco Bay Area. Her father was a business executive. Her mother, who worked occasionally as a guide in art museums, kept the house filled with books and became Miss Hempel’s first proving ground as a storyteller.

“The way I got my mother’s attention when I was a kid was by putting words together in an interesting way, or a funny way — what she found amusing,” Miss Hempel says. “Since [her attention] was what I wanted more than anything, and as a kid was very hard to get, that’s what I did.”

Miss Hem-pel didn’t plan to be an author but instead studied journalism and pre-med “until I hit chemistry.” Life drove her to the page. When Miss Hempel turned 19, her mother killed herself, and within a year, her mother’s sister did the same. In her 20s, Miss Hempel was in two bad auto accidents; she later wrote in the story “The Harvest” that she “moved through days like a severed head that finishes a sentence.”

Her luck changed after she moved to New York and sought out the Columbia University writing workshop taught by Gordon Lish, a former editor at Esquire and Alfred A. Knopf known for mentoring such authors as Raymond Carver and Richard Ford. For Miss Hempel, it was if she were staggering up the steps of a church.

“She was shy, and she was nervous, and she blushed a great deal,” Mr. Lish recalls. “She was desperate, desperate in every respect a human being could be — desperate, grappling, struggling, striving to get a hold on her experience.”

Mr. Lish believes writers don’t succeed because of talent but because of will: You become a great writer by wanting to be one. Drive, will, character, “all of which Amy has,” Mr. Lish says. Miss Hempel remembers how hard it was at the beginning, how she wondered if she should even be writing.

“And then I think of a sentence I really like,” she says, “that I’m proud of having worked really hard on.

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