Grace Paley Dies

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.

In Between Books

It is not often that I have a lull of more than two or three days between books I'm reading. I finished two books while on vacation recently: Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Hope Edelman's Motherless Daughters. Anne is often dismissed as the lesser writer among the three Bronte sisters, and after reading this book I would have to agree. I was especially perturbed to find that the narrative tied up all too neatly with everyone enduring through their problems to live happily ever after. Edelman's book, a nonfiction exploration of the lives of girls who have lost their mothers (most through illness-related death but also through suicide and abandonment) resonated with me because so much of what these now-women had to say about the emotional, psychological and existential condition of motherless daughters is familiar to adoptees such as myself.

On that note I also recenly finished reading the memoir The Mistress's Daughter by A.M. Homes. I had always been drawn to Homes's fiction, but it wasn't until her personal essay about being found by her birth parents when she was an adult appeared in the New Yorker a few years ago did I realize why I so identified with her writing. The Mistress's Daughter is her first autobiographical book (the New Yorker piece was its genesis). This is a quick read--I read it in a day--though passages of this book was hard for me to read because I kept having the strange sensation that I could have written a lot of it myself, word for word. It definitely stirred up a lot of emotions that I keep tamped down in daily life, so it left me feeling a bit wrung out. Although her reunion story and mine are different, we still share much of the same feelings of being betwixt and between, of having been broken and then put back together again in a new configuration.

There is a fairly new David Talbot biography of John and Robert Kennedy that I picked up from the review pile at Mother Jones that has roused some interest. I'm thinking of reading this next if I could find where in the house it is, but if anyone has any books to recommend please let me know.