It’s hard to overstate how startled I was upon first reading Grace Paley. At the time, I’d never really given a lot of thought to stories. I didn’t come across them much during my education—aside from a few Sherlock Holmes tales and too much Somerset Maugham. My idea of the form was very distorted. Neat little British packages tied up with a tight bow. Airless. I was unfamiliar with the more formally inventive American tradition, or the fact that there were any magazines or journals that published short fiction. (The first time I saw a copy of The New Yorker was when it published me.) Reading “My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age” in the early years of a new century was genuinely transformative. No twists or moralizing. Not much stately third person. No neat scenes. Not really any scenes at all. Just a loosey-goosey human voice coming at you, going wherever it wanted, arguing, joking, dramatizing, romanticizing, politicking. A working-class voice. A neighborhood voice. I came from a different neighborhood—a different country entirely—but recognized the Paleyverse immediately. I, too, grew up around working-class socialists, feminists, pacifists, marchers, and first-generation-immigrant mothers—the kinds of women who treated their activism as just another duty to be ticked off the long list of domestic chores. Meanwhile, the neighborhood elders came from another world (not so much the “Old World,” in our case, as the “third world”), and they, like Paley’s “father,” enjoyed giving the sort of advice that we mostly ignored or took with a large grain of salt: “The main thing is this—when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.” To which Paley’s narrator replies, “That’s a metaphor, right?” Nope. As advice, it’s up there with “You’ve got to work twice as hard to break even”—the mantra of my childhood. (Also not a metaphor.)
Paley reminded me of my past but also of my present: living in Greenwich Village, with a poet as a partner, trying to write while bringing up two kids. The startling aspect, to me, was that she included it all. She didn’t put a cordon around a short story and use a special literary voice to create it. In her expert hands a short story is like one of those cavernous shoulder bags you’ll need to carry in the city if your plan is to tote around four or five novels, a feminist treatise, a bunch of diapers, somebody’s lunch, a photocopy of a zoning law to brandish at a community-board meeting, and a large banner that reads “END THE WAR.” Paley is an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink sort of a writer, with an emphasis on the kitchen sink. The domestic is not banal to her, nor is it bourgeois. It’s perhaps a little perverse to write a story called “The Silence” in homage to one of the chattiest writers on the block, yet for me Paley has always served as a kind of stimulant to honesty. I can get all up in my head when I’m writing. But if I read a bit of Paley just before I open the document I feel some of that wildness and openheartedness enter me. My character Sharon in “The Silence” is a fictional person from a shadowy region of my mind, but Paley cleared the space and built a little platform so that Sharon could step forward and just . . . be. My Sharon is dealing with “the Change,” which seems also to be on Paley’s mind in “My Father.” (“We should probably begin at the beginning, he said. Change. First there is change, which nobody likes—even men. You’d be surprised. You can do little things—putting cream on the corners of your mouth, also the heels of your feet.”) But Sharon is not a participant in what I want to call “menopause discourse.” She doesn’t really have a language for what’s happening to her. She’s just trying to get through it.
Paley died in 2007, and I never got to meet her, but she is eternally present in my imagination, the kind of writer you might see out in the summer, sitting on her stoop, and when she spots you pacing the block, bitching about writing, she rolls up her sleeves and gives it to you straight: Please. Is it working down a coal mine? It is not. What to write about? Look around you! Nothing but people every place you turn! So, write! So, I did. ♦
