Reading Response to Amy Hempel's "In The Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried"

  I have to say that I really did enjoy this story and not because it was a sad and I do think that sad endings are some of the best stories but that the story actually made me mad. All throughout the story you have to two best friends, one who is terminally ill and the other who is coming to see her, interacting with one another. Our speaker comes and see her best friend in the hospital and they do everything wrong. Every idea you have of someone visiting a dying friend, whatever it is you thought throw it out the window. The whole story is about the speaker trying to deal with her best friend dying and all they do is talk about pointless trivia. And to be honest, after finishing it I realized that a story like this much better than one that follows to ideal route for a story like this. I realized that if I read something like that I wouldn't get the great internal struggle I do see on the page, and i wouldn't see the how great the ending was, coming full circle. Most of the time when I see someone do that I don't think it necessarily works out but in this case it does.