The Personals

In order to protect privacy, some names, identifying characteristics, dialogue and details have been changed or reconstructed.

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

FIRST EDITION

© Brian O’Connell 2019

Illustrations © Micaela Alcaino 2019

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Cover images © shutterstock.com

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Brian O’Connell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008321345

Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008321352

Version: 2019-09-06

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‘Just for a second, I thought I lost myself,

And I watched my body falling,

And all the colours look brighter now.’

Brian Carey, RIP

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The story goes that Ernest Hemingway and a few of his literary pals were knocking about the Algonquin Hotel in New York one night in the 1920s, before they had the joys of social media to help them avoid conversation, and they began challenging each other to write a novel using just six words. Cutting a long story short, Hemingway is said to have won hands down with the words: ‘For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn.’

He’s reputed to have said that those six words were the best he ever wrote. They are loaded with life experience, love, loss, death and hope perhaps; a six-word portal into lived experience that Dorothy Parker or William Carlos Williams might have been proud of. The only problem is, while this sounds a plausible story that has been handed down over decades as literary fact, it probably never happened – or if it did happen, it almost certainly predated Hemingway and his bohemian clique. An essay about a similar short story by William R. Kane appeared in 1917 and a newspaper column by R. K. Moulton in 1921 pointed to an advert he had seen: ‘Baby Carriage for Sale: Never Used’ and informed his readers that it embodied the plot of a story. The Hemingway anecdote probably evolved over time, as a literary agent more or less admitted decades later when he said that he had first heard the story from a newspaper syndicator in the mid-1970s, more than a decade after Hemingway had died.