A Conversation with My Father

Grace Paley was a 20th-century, American short-story writer and poet. Though her parents were Ukrainian Jews who immigrated to the United States, Paley was born and raised in the Bronx. As an adult, Paley became famous not only for her writings but also for her political activism and her commitment to pacifism and feminism.

These biographical details are important because much of Paley’s work, “A Conversation with My Father” included, draws on her own life and experiences. Though the central characters in this story are based on Paley and her father, the work as a whole is a self-conscious reflection on Paley’s philosophy as a writer. She believes that the straightforward plot lines embraced by other writers deprive characters of their right to an “open destiny” (Paragraph 3). Paley prefers to blend fact and fiction by having the father in the story reference a real story of Paley’s (“Faith in a Tree”) and having the writer in the story craft various fictional narratives based on a real neighbor of hers (and perhaps Paley’s as well).

This willingness to blur the lines between reality and fiction is characteristic of postmodernism, the literary movement Paley is typically associated with.