SOURCE: “PW Interviews Grace Paley,” in Publisher's Weekly, April 5, 1985, pp. 71-2.

In the following interview, Paley comments on her upbringing, her fiction, the rewards of parenthood, and the value of community participation and political action.

Grace Paley has been a respected name in American letters for years. Her new book of short stories, Later the Same Day, confirms her as an utterly original American writer whose work combines personal, political and philosophical themes in a style quite unlike anyone else’s.

Paley’s characters, women and men who have committed themselves to trying to alleviate some of the world’s myriad woes, usually appear in print as activists at demonstrations, marching with upraised fists. She has given them children, friends, lovers, aging parents, financial worries, shopping lists—in short, a private life to go with their public activities. Paley’s work is political without being didactic, personal without...