“Hansa and Gretyl and Piece of Shit”
by Rebecca Curtis
from the November 16, 2020 issue of The New Yorker
Wow — where has the week gone? I’m late posting this, as you can see, and I haven’t even read anything about this week’s story, “Hansa and Gretyl and Piece of Shit.” I like the fairy tale promise, but I have no idea what this will be like.
It’s been a long time since Rebecca Curtis was last in The New Yorker. We had “The Pink House” in 2014 and “The Christmas Miracle” in 2013. As I look back at the posts on those, I’m not sure if I ever read them. Betsy has some great responses, though, and the comments are rich. Going back to those has made me think I may have missed out and need to fix that while reading this new story.
Here is how it begins:
Gretyl wakes at 6 a.m., as usual, but her stomach feels crampy. These are not what her mother calls the “normal” cramps, which gnash her abdomen for four days each month. These fissures poke her midsection with acidic fingers as she dresses. She hunches while she brushes her teeth, unloads the dishwasher, and mops the kitchen. She walks down to the cellar, carries up stacks of logs, and feeds the woodstove. She toasts bread, but finds she’s not hungry, so puts it in her heavy schoolbag.
She doesn’t ask to stay home. Her mother’s warned her that she knows the girl feigns illness because she’s unpopular—a loser!—because she’s lazy and unlikable. The girl knows better than to whine about a stomach ache.
And here is Curtis’s interview with Willing Davidson, where she talks about mixing fantasy and reality as she tells this story about a teenage girl with appendicitis in a family that doesn’t want to deal with it.
I imagine by now in the week some of you have read this already. Please share any thoughts you might have! I hope you’re having a good week, and that the weekend comes soon to offer some more respite.
Complete knowledge of the Hansel and Gretel story is very much a prerequisite here. Specific details of the fairy tale are referenced — it’s not enough just to know a one-line summary. Unless you’ve read the story recently, or have a perfect memory, I think it’s a mistake to read this piece without reading the fairy tale first. The Grimms version must be an easy google.
I had not re-read the Grimm’s tale so I came at this “blind” so to speak. It engaged me, but I found myself rather irritated altogether with the quirkiness and grossness and surrealisms. It’s better than David Rabe’s story of a month back, but I can’t say I got much out of this besides being involved enough to finish it. But…perhaps it’s only meaningful on the intertextual level which (to be honest) I don’t much feel like pursuing.
Ken, I would say that the piece is intended to be read on the intertextual level. I was unfamiliar with the term “intertextual” before this thread, but I’m of course familiar with stories referring to other stories. I read Hansel and Gretel after the New Yorker piece but I think it would have been a better reading experience if I read the fairytale first. I will go through the fairytale references now in case any readers don’t want to reread it. 1) “by the hunter’s moon” — the moon features prominently in the fairytale. 2) In the New Yorker story, the father is a pilot and the mother is a homemaker. Obviously in the Grimms’ story, the mother is a homemaker but the father is a “poor wood-cutter”. 3) Throwing the crumbs to leave a trail and encountering a glitch when the birds eat the crumbs is a plot point from the fairy tale. 4) In both stories, the correct way to leave a trail is to use pebbles instead of crumbs (duh!). 5) In the New Yorker story, the cat provides guidance — it’s a bird in the Grimms’ story. 6) The theme of shoving the witch into the oven is common to both stories. 7) In both stories, the sacrifice of the children (child in the New Yorker story) is because of poverty. In the fairytale, the mother doesn’t think the parents can survive unless they kill the children. 8) The fairytale contains the line “He who says A must say B, likewise”. In the New Yorker piece, this becomes the closely parallel ‘Because he who says yes to “A” must also say yes to “B.” ‘ This parallel would almost certainly be missed by someone who hadn’t read the fairytale previously. It’s good to have an excuse to revisit childhood fairytales.
Thank you, Paul. I appreciate the guide to references.
While the parallels to the Grimm story are interesting, I don’t see how they enhance or help to elucidate the Curtis story. Surely her point is not just a retelling of the Grimm tale.
MAH, I don’t really understand your point. Look at it from my personal point of view. I read the New Yorker story and then I read the Grimms’ version. I find that various small details are repeated precisely and even quite an obscure line of dialogue (about B following A) is repeated almost verbatim. It surely makes no sense at all to suggest that observing these parallels is pointless and irrelevant. Obviously, the writer thinks the references are important or she wouldn’t have made them.
MAH, I suppose what is missing from your post is your conclusion. If you mean to conclude that my researching and explaining the parallels is a waste of time, then obviously I wouldn’t like to hear that. If you mean to suggest that you think the writer has failed to motivate the references to the fairy tale, then I respect that reader response. I interpreted your post as the former and therefore got irritated.
Jesus effing Christ, didn’t Neil Gaiman and Angela Carter do this like a quarter century ago back during the actual nineties? And their writing was way better. Oh, and what wonderful period details. A creative writer on fellowship who teaches for Kaplan. Walkmans. Y2K. This is like a bad TV show on VH1. POS is a real writer but her classmate the mainstream dunce gets all the acclaim; seriously? A character named Kind Boyfriend with an uppercase ‘K’ and ‘B’? An incompetent doctor like The Simpsons did thirty years ago?
Does this lady have pictures of The New Yorker editors engaged in malfeasance? One of their kids held hostage in a basement? She’s a privileged as hell pretty white lady from upper-middle-class money, not even trading on the banal identity politics of the moment: “Look, it’s Ghostbusters with women!” or “Look, it’s Hansel and Gretel with people of color!” The whole story is phony and contrived, an example of stacking the deck, just trite, unearned manipulation. What the hell is The New Yorker doing publishing this tripe?
I’m with Sean (basically). Paul: I think MAH is saying that the story doesn’t stand on its own and all he can see here is that she’s retelling the Grimm Bros. story.
After reading the responses, I feel better. This old English major wanted so much to understand. I now understand that Rebecca has attempted to enter a bizarre little world, be as gross as she can be, run it up the NY flagpole and see who is too intimidated to say, why that Emperor has an itchy crack AND no clothes.
CORRECTED
Hmmm, I have it still sitting on my nightstand . . . might be worth skipping.
Is the hunter in the story real, or is the girl just imagining him?
As entertaining as this thread has been, I think the tone isn’t fair to Rebecca. I found the story engaging in a way that I particularly enjoyed – it’s abstract, twinned to a fairy tale I ‘kind of, but not quite’ remember. I liked the homages to the fairy tale, the conflicted parents – hell the conflicted protagonist who doesn’t grow up hating those who refused to care for her when she most needed it.. the sisters who appear to care but perhaps not enough. I’d like to know more about the bearded hunter. Is he a figment of the protagonists imagination?
My guess is that it’s common for writers to read the reviews here. A previous author objected to the fact that her looks were discussed in one of the mookse reviews. There was an overwhelming consensus here that references to the looks of the writers are not appropriate. And what do we get from Sean H yet again? “She’s a privileged as hell pretty white lady from upper middle-class money”. I think that online forums and communities have standards and rules and it’s not ok to ignore them even if people disagree. I’m part of a Facebook forum that discusses life in my home town in the 1980’s. I was critical of certain individuals. It then emerged that that forum is for positive comments only and for people to bring happy memories and that it was wrong to discuss painful transgressions by others. So I respected that even though I felt that teachers’ mistakes were interesting and affected my upbringing. But Sean is taking a different line. It’s been explained to him that commenting on looks is not considered ok, but he doesn’t agree so he just keeps on doing it.
That’s a fair response, Paul, and thanks. I should have said something when I responded, since I too was uncomfortable with Sean’s comment. I try to be quite lax on here, which probably makes my attempts at moderation inconsistent. While I know Sean believes that upbringing and looks are part and parcel to how a writer writes and how a writer’s works are received, there must be a way of commenting on that without it sounding disparaging.
I wish Emily Litella from Saturday Night Live was still around to explain the significance of this short story title. She would know what the author intended because she was never easily grossed out by anything. I wish she was still alive.
The original Hansel and Gretel is a story of children´s resourcefulness. It signals that some adults are bad, and even harmful, people but that children are not powerless and can, in fact, save themselves. In this story, though, the child cannot outsmart her circumstances; instead, she only survives thanks to the acts of kindness that earn her the cat´s guidance and the mystery man´s magic whistle. And the ¨survival” itself is problematic–the doctors refer to her as dead and catalog a laundary list of damaged parts which eventually also includes, apparently, her reproductive capabilities. There is a happy ending, sort of, that includes this resurrected being´s slavish devotion to the parents whose greed and indifference killed/almost killed her. The author´s point in this twisted version of the story really isn´t clear–maybe that modern society´s greed, self-absorption, and materialism is wreaking havoc on children? Who knows? But I am not impressed.
The only thing I hated more than this story is myself for having finished listening to the author read it. I kept thinking I would find some redeeming value, but I didn’t. As well, I didn’t want to risk later reading some respected critic saying “It gets really good at such-and-such a place,” and then needing (ugh!) to actually read it. Perhaps if I had read it in the DSM as a case study of a dysfunctional family and how they were helped by frontal lobotomies, I might have enjoyed it, instead of feeling I wasted a precious hour of my life doing the literary equivalent of shoving glass shards under my fingernails.
I’m going to throw in with Neil here, as I liked the story. It’s a story of a girl who has been abused, emotionally, physically and sexually. This can happen even to pretty, upper-middle-class girls. Not saying the story is autobiographical, just that it’s not necessarily outside the realm of the author’s experience. This girl, abandoned by her parents, finds ways to survive, as did Hansel and Gretel in the fairytale (remember Hansel substituting a chicken bone for his finger so that the witch would fatten him up before killing him?) Gretyl has an appreciation for the beauty of the trees capped with snow. She has adopted a wild cat and takes pleasure in him. And somehow she conjures up a rescuer-from where, we don’t know, but people do get rescued from hell sometimes. It’s her kindness to him that connects them, and then he saves her.
It’s the unexpected that makes stories interesting, especially in these magical tales. The author tells a tale of threats and horror, but also of beauty and resilience. Gretyl, in spite of everything, chooses life and suffering over death and nothing.
I’m not saying anyone is wrong to have enjoyed the story, only that I honestly hated it and hated myself for having finished it. It was like making myself eat a bowl of something nasty because someone said “it’s good for you.”
I appreciate Neil’s comments because they closely mirror my reaction to the story on first reading.The allusions to the H&G story cannot be ignored of course but the horror of the protagonist’ s circumstances is what remains stuck in my head. I liked irony of the lurking hunter being rescuer rather than sinister threat. And what about the second daughter’s name? A comment on being a middle child? Here’s the thing: I found this story compelling enough for me to actually seek out critical reactions to it.
Re: Hansa and Gretyl, and Piece of Shit: This was one compelling story, and might I say, disturbing. The combination of narrative and dreamtime brought a foretelling and mystical atmosphere to a sense of immediacy, and I stayed up late to finish reading it last night. At some point [am I the only one?] the fraught nature of current events began to seep into the story, viz. the parents and the doctors’ neglect of what was maddeningly obvious v the political “leaders” and their allies’ neglect of a country sick with a terrible range of malaise…and our dreams of remedies just beyond reach. The allusion was quite on my mind. Now I will check the reactions of other readers: no comment…I am neither erudite nor a scholar.
Really enjoyed Steve Bober’s allusion.
Re Steve Bober: I did perceive allusions to news stories, but nothing pertaining to current events. About once a year, there’s a horror story of a family who neglected a child’s health for some trivial financial reason, when the family actually has the money. I can’t think of any specific examples, though.
Appreciate West and Bober.’s points. I found the story engaging, so eminently easy to fall into. The fairy tale twining grants innocence, doesn’t it? And has us at once wary of parents. As in the fairy tale, one parent is harder to fathom than the other as he loves the child. Like West, I see Hansa as a child of trauma. Gross anatomical details are repugnant, but like emotional trauma—not easy to see and difficult to talk about. Can we even bear to hear it? I appreciate Bober’s point that the sisters loved her but not enough. Curtis seems to be telling us the sisters are damaged in less obvious ways and they cannot perform as parents and protect the girl. POS seems scarred by her inability to step up. What a great thread! Where else could I turn to discuss this compelling story.
Can someone help me understand why there is one sister named Piece of Shit whose only part in the story, as far as I could see, was to underscore a family history of appendicitis?
Maybe the name of the sister is used to attract a wider readership or make an older old school story remix more relevant to life at the present time.
Madwomanintheattic, my thought was that Piece of Shit was so named because that’s what she thinks about herself – constantly failing her sister and giving useless critical feedback to writers.
I’m in a NYer discussion group and most did not enjoy this piece at all. But I took to this story quickly and felt it was a compelling one because I had read a bit about the author beforehand. Did you know she is a psychotherapist who deals specifically with “…humans and how humans change over time” as well as “…eating disorders, anxiety and depression, alcoholism and trauma in terms of psychotherapy.” (Wiki) I think readers who discuss RCC’s “entitled” background and consider it a liability are the same people who might say a Black male cannot write fiction about a Mexican immigrant’s plight attempting to get over the border. Have fiction writers always have had to “own” their experiences in writing? I believe it’s imperative not to mix the author up with the characters and situation. At the same time, she knows her subject: this writer is extremely familiar with the “humans” who have damaged backgrounds and need analysis. Perhaps this could be a light for some of them who do not see a “happy ending” for their plights. Just sayin…. Now go at it ripping my goodie-two-shoes apart, fellow thinkers.
It is good not to look at any New Yorker short story from just one or two majority critical points of view. Characters with damaged backgrounds in fiction are not easily considered by readers. Dark parts of life no matter how manifested can help readers understand others, whose reality seems way to remote or foreign from more ordinary or orderly existence. The best Mookse commentary collection on any short story contains different reactions or observations on what exists in the narrative. We can reread the story and see if we missed a critical aspect that might clarify or explain a particular character or situation. The parameters of a story should not be so narrow that they close off certain thoughts from reaching readers. I’m glad that Gottalovedogs posted her or his commentary. I totally agree one does not have to be a Mexican immigrant to write about their experience as in the novel, “American Dirt”. Thanks for your post and look forward to your thoughts on other New Yorker short stories.
I’m really surprised by the criticisms I’m reading here. The story really got to me, I have a sister who is disabled and whose situation has been worsened by the denial of her parents and the chaos that they have created in hospitals when she has been ill due to her moms undiagnosed personality disorder. Maybe it’s a personal thing for me. This type of situation in a family felt extremely real and there was a fairytale quality to it that I found haunting. I really like this story.
I’m with Sean – Gaiman and Carter did this way better, and without leaning so heavily on their sources that the story would crumble without knowledge of them. If you read Curtis’s interview about it online, she comes across as very pompous – names of Russian male writers thrown around to add lustre to this story, when it should shine on its own. Which also explains the self-indulgence: this story was pages too long and very repetitive. If she or the NY had cut at least 30%, it would have been much better.
It would also have avoided the absolute implausibility of multiple medical professionals unable to diagnose appendicitis – ridiculous! – and parents who’d rather have a child shit and vomit all over the house rather than take her to a hospital and avoid nasty smells and the damage to prized couches – also utterly ridiculous.
I loved this story, found the heroine’s struggles compelling, and her parents’ reactions to her condition dark and funny. I’m a big Angela Barrett fan, but always have a hard time with her cruel streak. There’s a lot of violence and mess in the Curtis story, too, but I like the fact that Gretel prevails, and ends up as a doctor who eases pain. I also like the way the author uses fantasy (the passages at night, in the forest, with the cat) so that you’re not entirely if she’s still alive, or a ghost. Another very nice touch: the cat describing how, if Gretel chooses, she can be torn apart by a bear. To me, that bit of dialogue sounds very much like a doctor describing—very dispassionately—a really gruesome treatment to a terminally ill patient.
I appreciate the more positive reviews of Stephanie and Ann G. I doubt that my response would be as enthusiastic as these two readers, but the fact that I went to the trouble of reading the original fairytale and pointing out the parallels suggests that I found the story at least worthwhile so I would dissent from the more trenchant criticism.
This is one of those stories I would like to ask the editor of TNY: why did you choose it? It’s an Ok story but I always expect NY fiction to be of a very high level.