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. In fact, postmodernists tend to be suspicious of the very notion of a hard division between fact and fiction. To these writers and philosophers, what we perceive as reality is often itself a narrative that we construct out of societal norms and personal experiences. In “A Conversation with My Father,” this idea is illustrated in the writer’s pushback against her father’s insistence on tragedy. The father sees suffering and death as the fundamental, objective realities of life, urging his daughter to concern herself with “truth first” (Paragraph 49). The daughter’s refusal, meanwhile, is indicative of a postmodern skepticism towards “grand narratives,” which claim to present a comprehensive theory of life or the world (Paragraph 49).

However, while “A Conversation with My Father” does exhibit many hallmarks of postmodernism (in particular, irony and metafiction), it is worth noting that Paley gives the final word in her story to the father, who suggests that his daughter’s witty storytelling is nothing more than a form of denial. In this way, Paley opens even the writer’s (and by extension her own) ideas to criticism. After the relatively lighthearted story that precedes them, the dying father’s blunt words (“When will you look [tragedy] in the face?”) become a serious question that probes into the nature of life (Paragraph 51). Paley poses this question to the daughter and to the story’s readers.