SOURCE: “Grace Paley: The Art of Fiction CXXXI,” in Paris Review, No. 124, Fall, 1992, pp. 181-209.

The following interview was conducted by three Paris Review writers. Paley discusses her early transformation as a writer, her fictional style, major influences, personal motivations, and the central themes in her work.

When Grace Paley visits New York she stays in her old apartment on West Eleventh Street. Her block has for the most part escaped the gentrification that has transformed the West Village since Paley moved there in the forties. The building where Paley lived for most of her adult life and where she raised her two children by her first husband, the filmmaker Jess Paley, is a rent-controlled brownstone walk-up with linoleum hallways. Mercifully spared mid-career renovations, Paley’s apartment retains the disheveled, variegated look of an apartment with children. Paley now lives in Thetford, Vermont with her second husband, poet...