A Conversation With My Father by Grace Paley - Summary

The narrator's father is sick. He asks his daughter to write him a simple story like Maupassant or Checkhov, with a linear plot. She doesn't like to but tries in order to please him. She writes a story, based in reality, about a young man who becomes a junkie and his mother who becomes a junkie to keep him company. After a while the boy is disgusted and leaves. The story is short and without details.

Her father asks for more details. He is not happy with the story. He is upset that the woman in her story has a child out of wedlock. They discuss storytelling technique and what the author does when she has difficulty inventing an end for her stories.

The author tries again. She injects more details into the story, more psychology and humor and causal connections. The mother in the story joins her son because she prefers to be with the young generation than her own. She ends her story with the son moving out, sober and the mother alone and unable to overcome the addiction.

Her father is still critical of the story. He thinks it is not plain enough. He does praise her sense of humor, and is interested in the characters. They argue when she says that her story is not necessarily tragic- that the woman could still have a happy end. The father criticizes her for not seeing a tragedy for what it is.

Even though she knows her father wouldn't like it, she gives the woman a happy ending. Or maybe it's because she doesn't want to doom the woman to eternal tragedy through a story. Perhaps she does so to maintain her freedom as a writer.

Grace Paley