51 pages • 1 hour read
Grace PaleyA Conversation with My Father
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1972A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
How Stories Are Told
“A Conversation with My Father” is first and foremost a story about storytelling. It not only contains two embedded narratives within the frame story but also depicts the conversation about literature that gives rise to them. Therefore, it tracks the process that the writer uses to craft them. The story also contains parallels between the writer and Paley herself, which encourages readers to view “A Conversation with My Father” as a meditation on Paley’s own work. For instance, when the father says he “object[s] not to facts but to people sitting in trees talking senselessly, voices from who knows where,” Paley is criticizing a story of her own entitled “Faith in a Tree” (Paragraph 7).
These self-conscious references to the story’s fictionality are characteristic of postmodern literature, and they mirror the blurred boundaries between the story and Paley’s real life. Both encourage readers to think about the ways in which we are all constantly creating narratives to make sense of the world around us. In the opening lines of the story, for instance, Paley offers two ways of understanding her father’s heart condition: a figurative understanding that focuses on the heart’s age and fatigue, and a medical explanation that attributes the heart’s weakness to low potassium. Just as importantly, Paley presents these two accounts of heart failure alongside one another without giving preference to either. Paley, like other postmodern writers, represents competing views of reality without trying to reconcile or decide between them. The implication is that in a complex and chaotic world, attempts to explain life via a single, straightforward narrative are likely to fail.
This idea is at the heart of the argument between the writer and her father. The writer struggles to tell a story with a traditional, linear plot not because she opposes the style on “literary” grounds, but because she doesn’t want to impose a definite narrative on her characters: “Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life” (Paragraph 3). Consequently, when she does try to tell a “simple story,” she does so in an ironic tone that opens the narrative to multiple interpretations. The events themselves may be tragic, but the writer voices them in a way that also invites humor (Paragraph 2).
By contrast, “plain tragedy” is exactly what the father is looking for in his daughter’s work. The father is from an earlier generation, and he prefers stories that present a unified theory of life. The authors he cites are all nineteenth-century realists who, broadly speaking, assume that the world works in a specific way that can be accurately translated into a narrative. Moreover, the father has a particular view of reality in mind. Partially because he is approaching death, he considers tragedy to be life’s defining feature. He, therefore, objects when his daughter suggests that the mother in the story could turn her life around, insisting, “Truth first. She will slide back” (Paragraph 49). Despite her own preferences as a writer, Paley gives the father in this story the last word, suggesting that there is merit in his ideas about literature after all.
Coming to Terms With Tragedy
The debate that the writer and her father have about tragedy is not simply a philosophical one. It takes place against the backdrop of the father’s heart failure and the unspoken reality that his condition is terminal. The father’s awareness of his own mortality is at the heart of his insistence that life is basically tragic. His remark about the story of the drug-addicted mother makes this clear: “[W]hat a tragedy. The end of a person” (Paragraph 40). Although the mother in the story is technically still alive at its conclusion, the father interprets her situation as a kind of figurative death. To him, it is the “end” of a unique human life and, therefore, an irreplaceable loss.
The writer, of course, insists that the woman’s story doesn’t necessarily end with her crying alone in her house, explaining that she could get sober and “be a hundred different things in this world as time goes on” (Paragraph 41). She attempts to explain this to her father because his belief that the woman will inevitably backslide simply doesn’t reflect the reality of today’s “funny world,” which grants second chances that were unavailable to her father’s generation (Paragraph 47). Nevertheless, the story does suggest that there is some truth to the father’s worldview in the grand scheme of things. As the father advises his daughter to “look [tragedy] in the face,” he also asks her to turn up the dial on his oxygen tank—a reminder of both his own impending death and the ultimate fate of all people (Paragraph 44).
The father believes that his daughter uses storytelling to deny this basic reality: “Jokes […] As a writer that’s your main trouble. You don’t want to recognize it” (Paragraph 42). The story that the writer tells actually underscores this possibility because it focuses on a writer—in this case, the boy—who uses language to obscure a distasteful reality. The name of the periodical he publishes is at once an allusion to a slang term for heroin (“horse”) and to the Judeo-Christian story of the golden calf—a false idol that the Hebrews worshipped during Moses’s absence. The implication is that the boy’s writings on the spiritual benefits of drug use are equally deluded, in part because they ignore the physical dangers of heroin. However, the writer does something similar with language throughout “A Conversation with My Father,” crafting stories that turn a blind eye to suffering and death. In fact, she herself admits that she wants to give the mother a happy ending because she’s aware that “Life” might not (Paragraph 45).
At the same time, however, this points to an important difference between the writer and the characters in her story. The difference is that she is aware of her fabrications while they are not. Therefore, it is not entirely accurate to claim, as her father does, that she simply refuses to “face” tragedy. She is aware of the fact that life itself “has no pity,” and that awareness gives rise to a sense of moral “responsibility” to the characters she creates (Paragraph 45).
Intergenerational Conflict
Relationships between parents and children loom large in both the frame narrative and the story-within-a-story. In each case, the central conflict plays out along generational lines. This isn’t surprising given the historical moment at which Paley wrote the story. “A Conversation with My Father” was first published in 1972, shortly after the rise of a counterculture that tolerated (or in some cases celebrated) things like drug use and sex outside of marriage. “A Conversation with My Father” deals explicitly with these cultural shifts as well as the generational conflicts that they either create or deepen.
Within the frame narrative, the moment that most clearly illustrates this cultural divide is the discussion of the woman’s marital status. When the writer explains that the woman’s son was born out of wedlock, the father reacts with exasperation: “For Godsakes, doesn’t anyone in your stories get married? Doesn’t anyone have the time to run down to City Hall before they jump into bed” (Paragraph 17). The writer explains that these details aren’t important to the story that she’s trying to tell, but the father insists that they are “of great consequence” (Paragraph 21). Regardless of how the father personally feels about extramarital sex, he grew up in a world where becoming pregnant out of wedlock could have devastating consequences for a woman. Therefore, he finds it difficult to believe that a detail like this could be irrelevant in terms of the woman’s ultimate fate.
By contrast, the mother in the story-within-a-story embraces “youth culture”—drug use in particular—and she claims to feel “very much at home” with her son’s generation (Paragraph 5). However, the mother’s enthusiastic acceptance of changing cultural mores doesn’t translate into a harmonious relationship with her son in either version of the story. In fact, her acceptance appears to be a desperate attempt to remain the central figure in her child’s life. It is especially significant that in the second version of the story, the son leaves his mother to move in with his girlfriend—a change that probably would have taken place at some point even if the mother’s drug use hadn’t been an issue. In other words, the story-within-a-story suggests that conflict between generations goes deeper than simple differences of opinion. To some extent, conflict is inherent in parent-child relationships as the child inevitably outgrows his or her early dependency.
With that said, the frame story suggests that while this kind of conflict may be unavoidable, it doesn’t have to be bitter or destructive. The argument between the writer and her father is good-natured. Moreover, if the writer isn’t ultimately able to satisfy her father’s desire for a “simple story,” she does at least try to do so (Paragraph 2).
