What would Grace Paley do?

Plus some sad recs & the scoop on my novel

Oct 20, 2023

I am reading Grace Paley again. Why? Because I am sad—for reasons both self and world — or maybe sad is not quite the right word. I am feeling somewhat dead, as in, the opposite of feeling alive, and Grace Paley is full of delight and precision and life.

Such as, this section from her story “Wants”:

A nice thing I do remember is breakfast, my ex-husband said. I was surprised. All we ever had was coffee. Then I remembered there was a hole in the back of the kitchen closet which opened into the apartment next door. There, they always ate sugar-cured smoked bacon. It gave us a very grand feeling about breakfast, but we never got stuffed and sluggish.
That was when we were poor, I said.
When were we ever rich? he asked.
Oh, as time went on, as our responsibilities increased, we didn’t go in need. You took adequate financial care, I reminded him. The children went to camp four weeks a year and in decent ponchos with sleeping bags and boots, just like everyone else. They looked very nice. Our place was warm in winter, and we had nice red pillows and things.

Red pillows and things!

My father died two weeks ago, a thing that I’m not yet ready to write much about here but which is nonetheless happening. Jews don’t really do this, but we did it anyway: for the duration of the days my mom and sister and partner and I sat shiva, we made a small altar in my parents’ kitchen window of some of my father’s favorite things. One of the things we put there was Paley’s The Collected Stories.

My father loved Grace Paley, putting her in the highest possible category of regard— “one of my heroes.” I’ll throw my lot in here and say: one of mine too. After all, I did tattoo her likeness on the fleshy part of my right upper arm. There is something about the space Paley carved out in the world, both in the literary world and the world world, that feels special, singular, singularly hers. Role models and heroes are a sticky business, but insofar as I aspire to be like someone, I aspire to be like Paley.

Here are the facts: Grace Paley was born on December 11, 1922—a classic Sagittarius—in the Bronx, to Jewish socialist parents. Like my father, Paley was a first generation American via parents who had immigrated from Russia/Ukraine fleeing anti-semitic persecution. Her family spoke Russian and Yiddish at home; her father was a doctor. Like my father, no one in Paley’s family went to synagogue, they were fully agnostic, secular Jews—not religious ones.

Paley was a member of a socialist youth group, dropped out of high school at 16, attended Hunter College for a year, and took night classes at The New School where she met W.H. Auden, hoping to be a poet. She received no degree, marrying her first husband, a camera man, at 19. For almost twenty years, she raised children, participated in grassroots community work, and wrote, mostly on scraps of paper and between other responsibilities.

Paley protested nuclear proliferation and American militarization, worked with the American Friends Service Committee, helped found the Greenwich Village Peace Center, organized one of the first "abortion speak-outs" in the 1960s after she had one abortion but couldn’t get a second one, joined the War Resisters League against the Vietnam War, accompanied a peace mission to Hanoi to negotiate the release of prisoners of war, served as a delegate to the 1973 World Peace Conference in Moscow, and helped roll out a banner that read “No Nuclear Weapons—No Nuclear Power—USA and USSR” on the White House lawn. She advocated for resisting U.S. military intervention in Central America and, relevant to the current moment, co-founded the Jewish Women’s Committee to End the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. “Today,” goes a 2004 interview with The Guardian, “she describes herself as a believer in diaspora and not nationhood - ‘I was never a Zionist.’”

In the introduction to The Collected Stories, Paley talks about how she finally, after many years of trying, got down to the business of writing. “I had written a few nice paragraphs with some first-class sentences in them, but I hadn’t known how to let women and men into the language, nor could I find the story,” she writes. But “some knowledge was creating a real physical pressure, probably in the middle of my chest—maybe just to the right of the heart. I was beginning to suffer the storyteller’s pain: Listen! I have to tell you something!”

Paley published her first book, a collection of short fiction, The Little Disturbances of Man (Doubleday, 1959) at age 37, followed by Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974) at age 52—I was today years old when I learned there is a movie adaption of this starring Kevin Bacon!—and Later the Same Day (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1985) at age 63. She only published short fiction, and some poetry; never a novel. “But,” The New York Times wrote in her obit in a move that imagines this “low” literary output to be in contradiction with lasting significance, “she attracted a devoted following and was widely praised by critics for her pitch-perfect dialogue, which managed at once to be surgically spare and almost unimaginably rich.”

I think about Paley all the time, and read her words circa once a week. I always begin any fiction class with “Wants,” from which I also read a section in my wedding vows (a different one than the one above). “There’s a case to be made that Grace Paley was first and foremost an antinuclear, antiwar, antiracist feminist activist who managed, in her spare time, to become one of the truly original voices of American fiction in the later twentieth century,” wrote Alexandra Schwartz for The New Yorker. “No one was more grimly adamant that the world was in mortal peril, or had more fun trying to save it from itself.”

Grimly adamant. More fun. What a way to live.

“Thinking about it some years later I understood I’d found my other ear,” Paley says, again in the introduction to her collected stories. “Writing the stories had allowed it—suddenly—to do its job, to remember the street language and the home language with its Russian and Yiddish accents, a language my early characters knew well, the only language I spoke. Two ears, one for literature, one for home, are useful for writers.”

By this, I think she meant that the first ear was sonic, lyric, listening for the rhythm of pleasing sound against sound, of the “first-class sentence.” The second was emotional, listening for what mattered and what made her feel like an animal at home. I’m holding the idea of these two ears with me this week, as I write and grieve and listen. When, as writers maybe, and as Jews maybe, we’re looking for what to do, how to be, we might, I think, look back at Paley.

Toppings

I’m trying out this new section where I recommend a few things each month, things that have been bonking around in my brain and that I need other people to read/watch/listen to too.

Terrace Story by Hilary Leichter. The novel of this fall as far as I’m concerned, a sweeping tale of family and loss and real estate and the future that is also such a damn pleasure to read—and re-read.
I Do Everything I’m Told by Megan Fernandes. Poetry! It’s true what they say, it’s the only thing I want to read while grieving and it makes any new sentences I’m able to write crackle.
The Hero of this Book by
Elizabeth McCracken
now out in paperback, though I loved it on audio, since McCracken reads it. Has there ever been a better story about loving an aging parent, especially an old Jew? There has not.
The audiobook of Counterfeit by Kirstin Chen. Purses! Twists! Clean your depression house in one go.
If you’re a person with a body, especially if you’re trying to divest from diet culture and/or a parent and you’re not subscribed to the Burnt Toast newsletter by
Virginia Sole-Smith
what are you doing?
This “Plus Sizes” episode collab between fashion history podcast Articles of Interest by
Avery Trufelman
and Ronald Young Jr’s new fat liberation podcast Weight for It . Finally, the answer to why so many plus size shirts have the “cold shoulder.”
The soundtrack to Stephen Sondheim’s musical Company. Especially “Being Alive,” a song my dad loved.

Book scoop

My novel, Housemates, now has a pub date — May 28, 2024 from Hogarth/Penguin Random House — and a description! Here it is <3

Two young housemates embark on a road trip to discover themselves in a fractured America—a sparkling novel of love, friendship and chosen family, by the award-winning author of The Third Rainbow Girl.

When Bernie replies to Leah’s ad for a new housemate in Philadelphia, the two begin an intense and defiantly un-categorizable friendship based on a mutual belief in their art, and each other. Both aspire to capture the world around them: Leah through her writing; Bernie through her photography.

After Bernie’s former photography professor, the renowned yet tarnished Daniel Dunn, dies and leaves her a complicated inheritance, Leah volunteers to accompany Bernie to his home in rural Pennsylvania, turning the jaunt into a road trip with an ambitious mission: to document America through words and photographs.

What ensues is a three-week journey into the heart of the nation, bringing the two into conversation with people from all walks of life, “the absurd dreamers and failures of this wide, wide country”, as they try to make sense of the times they are living in. Along the way, Leah and Bernie discover what it means to chase their own thoughts and dreams, and to embrace what they are capable of both romantically and artistically.

Housemates is a warm and insightful coming-of-age story of youth and freedom, and a glorious celebration of queer life – and how art and love might save us all.

Weird! Exciting! Love to all in these times.

yours,
Emma