It’s the birthday of Hortense Calisher (1911-2009, #nicelonglife), whose fiction explored “the isolation within families that cannot be avoided yet cannot be faced” and whose style ranged from spare to complex in works ranging from very short to epic. Calisher’s work was a finalist for the National Book Award three times and an O. Henry Prize winner multiple times.

NB: “Hortense” is vastly underused. Just looked it up at a baby name site and it’s currently used at a rate of, well, zero. Let’s turn this thing around and resolve to name any new babies we have this year “Hortense.” Hamsters count.

Calisher was born and raised in New York City to a German Jewish immigrant mother and a much older (22 years) Jewish father from Virginia. (Calisher’s memoir, Tattoo for a Slave (2004), tells the story of her slave-owning Jewish grandparents.) Calisher grew up during the Great Depression and found it just as much fun as everyone else; she studied at Barnard College, married engineer Heaton Heffelfinger, and had two children.

(Fun fact: five babies were named Heaton in 2017. Not sure if that’s five babies globally, in the U.S., on Antarctica, or what.)

Calisher wanted to write for years but put off publishing for fear of not being as good as the excellent authors she was raised on. In the late 1940s, she started publishing stories in The New Yorker, and her first collection, In the Absence of Angels, came out in 1951; the stories were heavily autobiographical and often featured Calisher’s alter ego, a young Jewish girl named Hester Elkins. Then Calisher won two Guggenheims (1952, 1955) and was granted one divorce (1958) (remember, people, correlation does not necessarily indicate causality) and married writer Curtis Harnack (1959). Her massive first novel, False Entry, came out in 1961; her fourth novel, The New Yorkers (1969), was its sequel and featured the same characters—including a 12-year-old girl who kills her father’s cheating wife. (Kids. Am I right?)

Calisher went on to write a total of 22 novels and story collections and three memoirs; her final novel was Sunday Jews (2003). She wrote well into her 90s and said in her memoir Herself (1972) that she “always had to write everything, no matter the subject, as if my life depended on it. Of course—it does.”

Have a fantastic Friday on the cusp of a wonderful two-week break from sending your kids to school and stay scrupulously honest to the data.