I was greatly saddened to read about this today. Paley was a huge influence on me in my attempts at writing short fiction, particularly her 1974 book of short stories called Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, which I read over and over again, utterly amazed at her mastery of dialogue: so spare yet utterly loaded. She used to teach at the City College of New York, which is where both my husband and I received our master's degrees in fiction writing, and, coincidentally, where we met. Paley had stopped teaching there a few years before I attended, but her presence was definitely felt, and we actually got to meet her after a reading she did at the 92nd Street Y in the early 1990s.
From her obituary in today's NYT: "Ms. Paley was among the earliest American writers to explore the lives of women — mostly Jewish, mostly New Yorkers — in all their dailyness. She focused especially on single mothers, whose days were an exquisite mix of sexual yearning and pulverizing fatigue. In a sense, her work was about what happened to the women that Roth and Bellow and Malamud’s men had loved and left behind."
In the coming days I'm sure I will be rereading her work.
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2 comments:
Amazing to be inside the rich world of your internal life, Christine. Amazingly cool site.
"She focused especially on single mothers, whose days were an exquisite mix of sexual yearning and pulverizing fatigue."
Hm....gotta put Grace Paley on my list.
"Pulverizing fatigue" pretty eloquently sums up the last two years of my life. Thanks for looking Amie.
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