(1) I first discovered Julie Hayden’s writing in my car, listening to a New Yorker Fiction Podcast: “Lorrie Moore reads Julie Hayden.” I came to appreciate Hayden’s wry, melancholy voice through Moore’s own soft voice, which I had never heard before, either.
(2) The story “Day-Old Baby Rats” hit me so hard, I felt loneliness I hadn’t earned. It’s the story of a nameless woman called “somebody” often enough that it becomes her name by default: “somebody wakes up, immediately flips over onto her back.” “Somebody leaves the house for the second and final time that day.” The story follows somebody throughout her day, taking her first shaky sips of alcohol in the morning, packing a flask “in case of emergency, of entrapment in subway or elevator.” Her consciousness is both inaccessible and consuming. As she pinballs around Manhattan, the story careens from present to past, from subject to subject—the city on that unusually warm day in January, memories of a remote island in Maine (“where the foghorn cries all night long, once a minute, ‘It hurts,’ warning ships off the rocks”), a Catholic confessional, a distant remembrance of an abortion (“Lying on a table, somebody cried, ‘Hey that hurts, it hurts,’ and yet it didn’t hurt that much.”) The story accumulates. It isn’t about any one thing, but rather how all things ricochet off one another, which is one way to describe the city itself. It’s the best New York City story I’ve ever read.
(3) I needed to read more—to know more—about Julie Hayden. A Google search turned up very little: her mother’s Wikipedia entry (Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Phyllis McGinley), a couple of blog posts from fellow podcast admirers, and her long list of bylines at the New Yorker, where she worked for sixteen years. The most helpful resource was an essay published in the Los Angeles Review of Books by S. Kirk Walsh, whose interviews with Hayden’s sister and coworkers rounded out her brief biography.
(4) Hayden grew up in Westchester, New York, the eldest of two daughters. Even as a child, Hayden was gripped with anxiety. Her sister told Walsh that Hayden’s “fears ran from tall buildings and traveling to escalators and elevators.” Like the somebody of “Day-Old Baby Rats,” Hayden relied on drinking to take the edge off those fears. Ten stories in her collection, The Lists of the Past, were originally published in the New Yorker. Shortly after her book came out, Hayden was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though she underwent surgery, her fear of chemotherapy meant that she never received full treatment. She got sicker and sicker, becoming increasingly reclusive and reliant upon alcohol. She died not many years later, at the age of forty-two.
(5) The Lists of the Past contains “Day-Old Baby Rats,” but it seems to be the black sheep of the collection. It sits in the middle of the book like an island, less populated, less nostalgic, more fearful, more solipsistic than the rest. I can see why Moore chose the story for the podcast—it’s the most freestanding story of the bunch, and its loneliness just wrecks you.
(6) The collection is divided into two sections, “Brief Lives” and “The Lists of the Past.” The stories in “Brief Lives” are linked mostly by theme and Hayden’s distinctive voice. Young mothers consider the identity shift that occurred when their babies were born; young women consider the prospect of not having children at all; couples that are remember couples that were—“What if we’d been married?” “I don’t want to talk about it.”
(7) It makes perfect sense to me that Lorrie Moore chose Julie Hayden to read for the podcast. The stories are concerned with everydayness, and scattered with punny Moore-isms, like this mental to-do list: “Call Bill the auto mechanic, Bill the plumber. Feed the birds. Feed the plumber, pay the Bills.” But of course the truth of the matter is that Moore’s writing is filled with punny Haydenisms.
(8) Section two of the book, “The Lists of the Past,” zeros in on one family—empty nesters and their two adult daughters—in the last months of the father’s life. Whereas all the previous stories focused on young women or girls, the last six stories—half the book—focus primarily on the father, Ben, and his daughter, Cornelia, whose childhood memories, it turns out, were the occasion for an earlier story, “A Touch of Nature.” This subtle linking of stories creates a feeling of the book being haunted. Reading it elicits a sense of déjà-vu—haven’t we been here before? Met you before? Hayden’s voice contributes to the transient feeling. Simultaneously dreamy and sharp, her narrators revel in the details. Sometimes, though, the microscope is dialed so close that it’s hard to tell what we’re looking at. To varying degrees, her stories have the trajectory of a stone skipped across water. They dip in and out of the unseen, giving just a glimpse of the darkness before slipping back into the equally fleeting light.
(9) Lists are everywhere in this book. On the very first page: “sand toys, several Matchbox cars, The Gingerbread Man in a Little Golden Book, a spoon, his crib blanket—extensions of his personality, definitions of himself.”
The lists take on literal shape and form in the second section, running vertical up the page, illustrating a month’s worth of tasks in the garden. As Ben grows sicker, his family and neighbors take care of his garden, doing more harm than good with their thoughtfulness. Ben arrives home from the hospital and immediately begins making a list in his head: “(1) Hospital azaleas by the flagstone path to the veranda. (2) Clip hedge.” But in the same breath he exclaims, “‘Wonderful! You’ve done a great job! Couldn’t have done it better myself.’ And the black squirrel scampers up the elm tree.”
(10) Hayden clearly had a passion for nature and its language. She names plants and birds as if invoking saints and angels: “goldenrod and asters stand relicts of August, gone to seed and pod—yarrow, tansy, Queen Anne’s lace, and thistle…Boneset, Saint-John’s-wort, common everlasting, pussytoes.” She takes as much joy in list-making as Ben does.
(11) Even in stories about dying, there isn’t much fear of death. Fear of heights, of elevators and subways, of judgment—sure—but for a collection that focuses half its pages moving purposely towards a man’s death, it is bursting with life. But that’s not to say Ben doesn’t think about it: “Turning and turning the fact of death like a pebble in the pocket of his dressing gown, worn smooth through fingering, getting acquainted with the surfaces, the weight, smooth, compact, hard.”
In the last pages, Ben asks himself, “Why am I so frightened?” But his fear is held in a detached way, as if instead of experiencing it, he were considering what it would be like to be frightened. It’s a stark contrast to the crippling anxiety experienced by somebody in “Day-Old Baby Rats,” and possibly Hayden herself.
(12) It’s impossible for me not to ask—was this her point of view, too? Was she scared of chemo, but not scared to die? I might not ask these questions if Hayden didn’t seem like such a mysterious figure. Her fiction is one of the few resources, but you don’t need to care about her (or the answers to those questions) to care about the stories. They have lives of their own.
