RIP Grace Paley
An hour ago I would have said my week couldn’t get any worse. I would have been sorely mistaken.
Terrible news: The great Grace Paley, feminist, activist, and until today one of our best living short story writers, has died. Leora Skolkin-Smith (whose fiction Paley created an imprint to publish) sent word in email. “The last thing Grace was working on was my own novels,” she says, “and I am dedicating the film of my novel Edges to her. I am just lucky, no one special, I just had that privilege of closeness with her at very end of her long amazing life.”
I met Grace Paley once. Twice, actually. Under the most embarrassing fangirl circumstances.She was coming to Gainesville for a reading, and I’d been carrying around her book for weeks. The night before the event, she showed up with the local creative writing luminaries at the restaurant where I’d taken my boyfriend for a fancy dinner. Not being gifted in the art of timing, then or now, I hemmed and hawed about whether to go talk to her. We had ordered desserts and their table had started into appetizers before I made up my mind.
I’d had too much wine and, it being the 90s, was wearing a black lycra dress with thigh-high stockings that wouldn’t stay up. So I hobbled rather than walked over to lay on her the same uninspired I just love your work so much! that girls at college campuses the United States over must have bombarded her with every night.
The other people at the table studied their plates and napkins. Some of them knew me: I’d taken or dropped out of their classes. It was clear that, the minute I went away, they would turn to her and mutter some apology. Honestly, these hayseed students of ours. Please, have another glass of White Zinfandel.
But Paley smiled. She was wearing sneakers, a t-shirt, and some sort of pendant, and she looked fragile and luminous alongside the tanned Floridians. “Thank you,” she said. “Will I see you at the reading tomorrow?”
The next night, she not only remembered me, but asked if I wrote, and encouraged me to keep at it.
And this wasn’t a fluke. My friend Michelle met Paley a few years ago at a NOW anti-war protest, and she was just as kind, just as encouraging.
Now that I live in New York City, I realize how rare it is for a writer to be so genuinely warm to someone who has nothing to offer but enthusiasm. And with Grace Paley’s death, it’s more rare than ever.
Further reading, and more:
- “All my habits are bad,” Paley once told Salon.
- Listen to an old 92nd St. Y recording at the Times’ dedicated author page.
- My own past Paley posts can be clicked through here.
- There have been rumors for a year or two about a Paley documentary. Leora Skolkin-Smith may have details.
Add New Comment
Viewing 4 Comments
Thanks. Your comment is awaiting approval by a moderator.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
I loved your description of you first meeting her. And thanks for all the links. I've got a lot of reading to do.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Grace Paley, the first recipient of the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit, was born in the Bronx in 1922. She is the author of three highly acclaimed collections of short fiction--The Little Disturbances of Man (1959), Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974), and Later the Same Day (1985)--as well as three collections of poetry, including Leaning Forward, also published in 1985. Ms. Paley has taught at Columbia and Syracuse Universitites, and currently teaches at both City College of New York, where she is writer-in-residence, and Sarah Lawrence College, where she has taught creative writing and literature for 18 years. She received a Guggenheim fellowhsip in 1961, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1966, and an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1970. She is a member of the Executive Board of P.E.N. Actively involved in anti-war, feminist and anti-nuclear movements, Ms. Paley has been a member of the War Resisters' League, Resist, and Women's Pentagon Action, and was one of the founders of the Greenwich Village Peace Center in 1961; she regards herself as a "somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist." Ms. Paley has two children and one grandchild, and divides her time between New York City and Thetford Hill, Vermont. In Spring 1987, Ms. Paley was awarded a Senior Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts, in recognition of her lifetime contribution to literature.