Grace Paley, a Woman of Her Words

One day she babysat for a Doubleday editor. She left her pile of stories on his kitchen table. He found them and read a few, enough to decide to take them to his chief editor, who then asked Grace to write a "few more like this." It was from those efforts that her first collection, "The Little Disturbances of Man" (1959), was compiled and published by Doubleday.

She would later marry Robert Nichols, a landscape architect and himself a poet, short-story writer and novelist who remained her husband until her death this week at 84.

She and Bob traveled through Latin America, immersing themselves in the turbulent politics of Chile. They shared a passion for the intersections between politics and literature and would later form Glad Day Books. (It was Grace who would edit and publish my novel "Edges: O Israel, O Palestine." And she had even begun to help me return to that first work of mine from college.)

Grace joined the War Resisters League and served as a delegate to the 1974 World Peace Conference in Moscow, and in 1978 she was arrested as one of the "White House Eleven" for unfurling an anti-nuclear banner on the White House lawn.

Perhaps it was Grace's activism, her idealism in other spheres, that formed many of her beliefs about literature, too. Writing was not there to make people feel good and sell copies. It was there as an expression of social and personal turmoil, as truth, and even as a disturbance in the skies -- dark, troubling, discomforting. She did not believe in pandering to the major media, in writers becoming stars instead of truth-tellers.

She also rejected the idea held by many that she was a political writer. That notion was ridiculous, she told the New York Times many years ago: "I mean, in Europe, for a writer not to be political is peculiar, and in this country for a writer to be political is considered some sort of aberration, or time waste. I'm not writing a history of famous people. I am interested in a history of everyday life."

She wrote in "A Conversation With My Father": "I would like to try to tell such a story, if he means the kind that begins: 'There was a woman . . . ' followed by plot, the absolute line between two points which I've always despised, not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life."

Maybe that is why my arrival at her office so long ago with pages of chaos on my way to becoming a novelist never seemed to daunt her.

I would like to think that perhaps she felt the same about me as she felt about the characters in her stories.