Grace Paley, RIP
[lots of links at orig]
http://maudnewton.com/blog/?p=7928
R.I.P. Grace Paley
An hour ago I would have said my week couldn’t get any worse. I would
have been sorely mistaken.
Terrible news: The great Grace Paley, feminist, activist, and until
today one of our best living short story writers, has died. She was
84. Leora Skolkin-Smith (whose fiction Paley created an imprint to
publish) sent word in email. “The last thing Grace was working on was
my own novels,” she says, “and I am dedicating the film of my novel
Edges to her. I am just lucky, no one special, I just had that
privilege of closeness with her at very end of her long amazing life.”
I met Grace Paley once. Twice, actually. Under the most embarrassing
fangirl circumstances.
She was coming to Gainesville for a reading, and I’d been carrying
around her book for weeks. The night before the event, she showed up
with the local creative writing luminaries at the restaurant where
I’d taken my boyfriend for a fancy dinner. Not being gifted in the
art of timing, then or now, I hemmed and hawed about whether to go
talk to her. We had ordered desserts and their table had started into
appetizers before I made up my mind.
I’d had too much wine and, it being the 90s, was wearing a black
lycra dress with thigh-high stockings that wouldn’t stay up. So I
hobbled rather than walked over to lay on her the same uninspired I
just love your work so much! that girls at college campuses the
United States over must have bombarded her with every night.
The other people at the table studied their plates and napkins. Some
of them knew me: I’d taken or dropped out of their classes. It was
clear that, the minute I went away, they would turn to her and mutter
some apology. Honestly, these hayseed students of ours. Please, have
another glass of White Zinfandel.
But Paley smiled. She was wearing sneakers, a t-shirt, and some sort
of pendant, and she looked fragile and luminous alongside the tanned
Floridians. “Thank you,” she said. “Will I see you at the reading
tomorrow?”
The next night, she not only remembered me, but asked if I wrote, and
encouraged me to keep at it.
And this wasn’t a fluke. My friend Michelle met Paley a few years ago
at a NOW anti-war protest, and she was just as kind, just as
encouraging.
Now that I live in New York City, I realize how rare it is for a
writer to be so genuinely warm to someone who has nothing to offer
but enthusiasm. And with Grace Paley’s death, it’s more rare than ever.
Further reading, and more:
“All my habits are bad,” Paley once told Salon.
Listen to an old 92nd St. Y recording at the Times’ dedicated author
page.
Amitava Kumar excerpts “Friends,” a Paley short story he can’t put
out of his mind.
Past MaudNewton.com posts can be clicked through here.
There have been rumors for a year or two about a Paley documentary.
Leora Skolkin-Smith may have details.
Update, 8/23: The Associated Press confirms the sad news.
Posted by Maud on August 22nd, 2007