51 pages • 1 hour read
Grace PaleyA Conversation with My Father
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1972A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
Oh! Golden Horse!
In the second version of the story that the writer tells, she notes that the boy founds a periodical after he begins doing drugs: “He was in fact hopeful, an ideologue and successful converter […] Seeking a wider audience, using important connections, he drummed into Lower Manhattan newsstand distribution a periodical called Oh! Golden Horse!” (Paragraph 29). The name of the publication is significant because “horse” is a slang term for heroin and because it references the story of the Hebrews worshipping a golden calf—a false god they turned to while Moses was on Mount Sinai. The periodical is a symbol of delusion and denial; the boy not only refuses to see the dangers of drug use but also makes it into a kind of religion that he preaches to others. In this sense, the periodical reflects Paley’s interest in storytelling. It also lends some weight to the father’s accusation that his daughter is simply refusing to face the truth. In this case, language is clearly being used as a means of obscuring an uncomfortable reality.
Jokes
Broadly speaking, the writer’s father uses the word “jokes” as a shorthand for everything he finds problematic about his daughter’s approach to writing. For instance, when his daughter questions whether she has provided enough detail to satisfy him, he responds, “With you, it’s all a joke” (Paragraphs 15). He feels, in other words, that his daughter is failing to take both his request and the subject of the story seriously. Once the writer reads the second draft, however, the father expands his criticism beyond the confines of the narrative. When the daughter insists that in contemporary society the woman might actually be able to turn her experiences with addiction to her advantage, the father dismisses this too as a “joke” (Paragraph 42). In this way, the motif of joking fleshes out the father’s views on literature and life. According to him, life is inevitably tragic, so fictional depictions of it should be serious in tone.
The Russian Writers
Along with the French author de Maupassant, the Russian writers that the father repeatedly cites represent the kind of storytelling that the narrator is pushing back against. Turgenev and Chekhov—the two authors that the father mentions by name—are realist writers whose works, as the father puts it, tell “plain ordinary stor[ies]” (Paragraph 7). Ultimately, however, it becomes clear that what the father means by this is not simply stories that include realistic details, but rather stories that are unambiguously tragic. To him, “plain tragedy” is the basic (or “plain”) reality of life (Paragraph 42). As a result, he is dissatisfied with the story of the drug-addicted mother. Although the plot of the story that the writer tells could conceivably be written in a realistic mode, she chooses to recount it in an ironic tone that makes it more than simply sad.
