A Conversation with My Father

Like the narrator, the narrator’s father is never named. Nevertheless, Paley paints a clear picture of him over the course of the story. He is 86, a former doctor and artist, and currently suffering from heart failure. Paley also implies that the father in the story, like her own father, is Ukrainian. When describing the kind of story that he wishes his daughter would write, he references Chekhov, Turgenev, and other “Russian writers [his daughter] never heard of” (Paragraph 7).

As his familiarity with literature and his background as an artist suggest, the father shares the writer’s interest in “details, craft, technique” (Paragraph 25). Unlike his daughter, however, he prefers narratives with definite storylines and endings. His tastes likely stem from traditionalism. For instance, he also objects to the fact that characters in his daughter’s stories don’t take the time to “run down to City Hall before they jump into bed” (Paragraph 17). On a deeper level, however, the father’s preferences reflect his belief that life is fundamentally tragic because it inevitably ends. As an old man, he wants his daughter to recognize this basic fact, perhaps to help lessen the shock of his own impending death.

In response to her father’s request for a story, the writer invents a woman based on a neighbor of hers. The woman passionately loves her son. She starts doing drugs when her son starts doing them so that she can remain part of his life. The woman is devastated when her son decides to get clean. He cuts her out of his life when she fails to do the same.

Although neither version of the story provides much detail beyond this, the figure of the mother is important for several reasons. First and foremost, her story illuminates the differences between the writer’s and her father’s attitudes towards fiction. It also echoes the frame story’s theme of intergenerational conflict. Unlike the writer’s father, who disapproves of changing societal attitudes towards things like drugs and sex, the mother in the story is desperate to keep up with “youth culture” (Paragraph 5). The fact that her son abandons her in spite of this suggests that the mother’s belief that she could remain relevant to her son was deluded. Finally, the mother’s desire to please her son mirrors the writer’s desire to please her father, underscoring the difficulty of intergenerational communication.

The son in the writer’s story, like his mother, is based on a neighbor of hers. He is an intelligent boy. When he begins doing drugs as a teenager, he starts publishing a periodical that promotes drug use. However, when he becomes infatuated with a girl who runs a periodical dedicated to health food, he decides to leave the world of drugs behind. Doing so also means leaving his mother. He gives his mother an ultimatum: He will only agree to see her after she has been clean for 60 days. Overall, the boy comes across as somewhat shallow and self-involved, while his mother remains obsessive and deluded in her attempts to connect with him. As a result, conflict between the two is inevitable.