Later the Same Day by Grace Paley
"Later the Same Day" by Grace Paley is a collection of short stories that captures the diverse voices and dialects of New York City, reflecting the complex nature of identity through individual narratives. The collection features the character Faith Darwin, who serves as a lens through which various themes of maturity, memory, and personal history are explored. As Faith recounts her experiences, the stories highlight the contrast between public and private narratives, particularly emphasizing how women may navigate their stories differently from men.
Throughout the collection, different characters, including those affected by historical events such as China's Cultural Revolution, share their unique perspectives, illustrating the interplay of personal and communal identity. The themes of motherhood, loss, and community resonate throughout the stories, showcasing a circle of women who connect through shared experiences, even in the face of mortality.
Critically acclaimed for its sensitivity to ethnic identity and feminist themes, "Later the Same Day" offers a rich exploration of storytelling and the significance of finding one's voice amid a tapestry of varied human experiences. This collection remains relevant for its insights into relationships among women and its broader commentary on societal issues.
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Subject Terms
Later the Same Day by Grace Paley
First published: 1985
The Work
Grace Paley’s Later the Same Day contains the stories of people speaking in the varied dialects of New York City. In these stories, identity is formed through people’s acts and through their unique stories. As in Paley’s earlier collection, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Faith Darwin is a recurring character, but here she is the mature woman, looking back at her life. In “The Story Hearer,” for instance, Faith is asked to tell her lover, Jack, the story of her day. Despite her effort to “curb [her] cultivated individualism,” she ends up sidetracking, watering her “brains with time spent in order to grow smart private thoughts.” Jokingly, Faith comments on men’s love of beginnings, and thus suggests that women move through stories and time quite differently, tempted by the private, rather than the “public accounting” of life. Similarly, in “Zagrowsky Tells,” “Lavinia: An Old Story,” and “In This Country, but in Another Language, My Aunt Refuses to Marry the Men Everyone Wants Her To,” identity is a matter of individual stories told in first-person narratives and ethnic dialects.
To a lesser degree than in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, identity is also a matter of one’s relationship to history and community. In “The Story Hearer,” Faith wants to rise above her time and name, but finds herself “always slipping and falling down into them, speaking their narrow language.” In “The Expensive Moment,” Faith’s friends and families respond to the aftereffects of China’s Cultural Revolution, relating their experiences to America’s “revolutions” of the 1960’s. A visiting Chinese woman quickly identifies herself as still a Communist, but later in the story, another Chinese woman asks about children and “how to raise them.” Like Faith and other mothers in Paley’s fiction, these women “don’t know the best way.” In a world and country divided by different voices, different genders, and different politics, there is still possibility for community and for common identities. “Friends” pays tribute to Faith’s dying friend Selena, and the circle of women who go to visit her. Dying sets her apart from the others, but Selena is a mother, as are they, of a child in a generation “murdered by cars, lost to war, to drugs, to madness.”
Later the Same Day was highly acclaimed by critics for its sensitivity to human and ethnic identity and for its experiments with storytelling. It continues to be significant in light of feminist concern with world peace, relationships among women, theories of women’s language, and the importance of finding one’s own voice.
Bibliography
Aarons, Victoria. “Talking Lives: Storytelling and Renewal in Grace Paley’s Short Fiction.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 9 (Spring, 1990): 20-35. Argues that although Paley’s characters try to reinvent themselves by telling stories, she ironically undermines their attempts to do so. Through storytelling, her characters build communities of women; the telling of stories becomes the saving of identity.
Baba, Minako. “Faith Darwin as Writer-Heroine: A Study of Grace Paley’s Short Stories.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 7 (Spring, 1988): 40-54. Focuses on Faith as a middle-aged woman in the 1970’s and 1980’s in such stories as “Friends,” in which she visits a dying friend, and “Listening,” in which she shares stories with her new husband Jack. Argues that Faith’s career shifts from domesticity to social awareness to the knowledge that storytelling is the means of preserving humanity.
Book World. XV, April 28, 1985, p. 3.
Booklist. LXXXI, February 15, 1985, p. 802.
Christian Science Monitor. May 7, 1985, p. 25.
Commonweal. CXII, June 21, 1985, p. 376.
Criswell, Jeanne Salladé. “Cynthia Ozick and Grace Paley: Diverse Visions in Jewish and Women’s Literature.” In Since Flannery O’Connor: Essays on the Contemporary American Short Story, edited by Loren Logsdon and Charles W. Mayer. Macomb: Western Illinois University Press, 1987. Compares and contrasts the thought and art of Paley with Ozick; argues that whereas Ozick writes from a classical feminist perspective, Paley manifests a feminine consciousness of empathy with her characters.
Kirkus Reviews. LIII, February 1, 1985, p. 107.
Library Journal. CX, April 1, 1985, p. 159.
Los Angeles Times Book Review. May 19, 1985, p. 2.
Lyons, Bonnie. “Grace Paley’s Jewish Miniatures.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 8 (Spring, 1989): 26-33. Discusses how Paley’s stories are grounded in Jewish experience. They embody an oral framework of belief practiced by the Jewish culture and constitute a coherent Jewish vision. Argues that her stories convey the sense that in a patriarchy, the little person—one of Paley’s most frequent concerns—is usually a woman.
Ms. XIII, April, 1985, p. 13.
The Nation. CCXL, June 15, 1985, p. 739.
New Directions for Women. XIV, May, 1985, p. 5.
The New Republic. CXCII, April 29, 1985, p. 38.
The New York Review of Books. XXXII, August 15, 1985, p. 26.
The New York Times. April 10, 1985, p. 22.
The New York Times Book Review. XC, April 14, 1985, p. 7.
Newsweek. CV, April 15, 1985, p. 91.
Publishers Weekly. CCXXVII, February 8, 1985, p. 68.
Schleifer, Ronald. “Grace Paley: Chaste Compactness.” In Contemporary American Women Writers: Narrative Strategies, edited by Catherine Rainwater and William J. Scheick. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985. Discusses the purposeful lack of closure in Paley’s stories, which creates a sense of “open” lives rather than contrived climaxes. Focuses on several of Paley’s “minimalist” stories and stories that seem irresolute and open ended and thus challenge “storyness.”
Taylor, Jacqueline. Grace Paley: Illuminating the Dark Lives. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. This is the most detailed discussion of Paley’s “woman-centered” point of view. Taylor analyzes Paley’s recognition of the problems women face when trying to use a language based on male categories. Separate chapters deal with Paley’s humor, her narrative structure, her link with the oral tradition, and her experimentation with undermining the authority of the narrator.
The Village Voice Literary Supplement. June, 1985, p. 9.