“How to Leave Hialeah” by Jennine Capó Crucet
I don’t really want to talk about this story, which is told in the second person at first successfully and then increasingly less successfully as the story gets too particular.
I’m more interested in how Crucet wrote this story. She says, “I made a list of all the people I hated. Then I strung together versions of a few of these people [and] unleashed this narrator on them. A lot of my stories come from a place of anger, which is probably not the healthiest place, but it’s where I tend to start.”
The only short story I ever wrote was for a high school English class in response to Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (still my favorite book). The assignment was to create a grotesque story of our own, based on a teacher at our school. My English teacher was a shrewd, courageous man: high schoolers have a lot of hate and scorn and not many healthy outlets for it.
I hated my history teacher. I wrote a brutal, nasty short story about her desperately soliciting her students’ approval, ending with her crying in our humanities building’s bathroom stall. It was the easiest thing I ever wrote.
Naturally, everyone in our class failed at the assignment, because Anderson doesn’t actually hate anyone in Winesburg. He was able to capture the sadness and hopes of the town’s residents without passing judgment. That kind of objectivity doesn’t come at sixteen.
