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    A Study Guide for Grace Paley's "Conversation with My Father"
    A Study Guide for Grace Paley's "Conversation with My Father"
    A Study Guide for Grace Paley's "Conversation with My Father"
    Ebook27 pages17 minutes

    A Study Guide for Grace Paley's "Conversation with My Father"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Grace Paley's "Conversation with My Father," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJul 6, 2016
    ISBN9781535821063
    A Study Guide for Grace Paley's "Conversation with My Father"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Grace Paley's "Conversation with My Father" - Gale

      1

      A Conversation with My Father

      Grace Paley

      1972

      Introduction

      Grace Paley’s A Conversation with My Father was originally published in the New American Review in 1972. It was subsequently included in Paley’s second collection of short stories, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, published in 1974. On one level, the story is about women’s relationships with their fathers and sons. Paley recounts a visit between a middle-aged woman and her elderly, bedridden father, who suffers from heart disease. The father reproaches his daughter, a writer, for not constructing straightforward narratives. He encourages her to emulate the nineteenth-century writers Anton Chekhov and Guy de Maupassant, who wrote sparsely realistic tragedies. The daughter attempts to do so, telling him a story about some neighbors, a drug-addicted mother and son. She does not write a tragic ending, but ultimately both mother and son overcome their addictions. Her father rejects her ending, stating that she is unable to face tragedy in life and in fiction. On another level, the story is about storytelling. Within the larger story of the father and daughter, Paley includes two versions of another story, the story about the drug-addicted family. The presence of two stories, the portrayal of a writer writing a story, and the conversation about fiction between the narrator and her father make A Conversation with My Father a metafictional work, a story about stories and

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