Grace Paley's short story "A Conversation With My Father" is notable because it has a main story and then an "inside story" that the narrator makes up and then reads to her father. The purpose of this paper is to interpret how the two stories fuse together and give the reader a unified vision of Paley's world.
The female narrator of the story could be Paley herself. She tells of her eighty-six year old father, and how he wants her to write a story in the manner of de Maupassant or Chekhov. The narrator (whom we'll call Paley in this critique) goes ahead and writes a story about a woman whose fifteen-year old son becomes a junkie. Then the woman becomes a junkie as well.
When Paley reads the story to her father, he objects to the lack of detail in the tale. The father feels that Paley's technique in the story reflects her attitudes in real life. He wants to know if the woman had the child out of wedlock. He wants to know more about the woman's parents.
In short, the father wants Paley to have a greater sense of tradition and background. He feels that her life in New York City is too "sketchy," just like the story is. He doesn't understand how she could derive meaning from life-- and the story-- without knowing more about the people who inhabit it.
Paley sets out to remedy what she feels are very legitimate criticisms of her work. In adding more information to the story, she finds that it is her wild sense of humor that takes over. She writes about the woman's feelings toward the younger generation, how she becomes a junkie to experience the rites of passage of the youth.
As the details accumulate in the story, there are references to everything from "an Antonioni film" to "Coleridge" and "Leary" (538). Paley is good at giving the story more attention in the various elements that surround the woman's life, but she still is not entirely successful in pleasing her father.
The father complains that the s...