Books: Little Disturbances of Woman Later the Same Day

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Like her characters, Paley has recently tended to loosen some of her moorings. The lifelong New Yorker now spends six months of each year in Thetford, Vt., where her second husband, Robert Nichols, an architect and writer, has retired. The rest of the year she lives alone in a modest Greenwich Village apartment. Coiled up in an armchair in her workroom, the 5- ft. 1-in. author confides that she is not a disciplined writer. "But once I have a story, I keep revising, typing and retyping till I can't find anything wrong." Since one of Paley's gifts is an infallible ear for New York City speech--Irish, black and Jewish--it is scarcely surprising that her revisions are all made out loud as she talks to her typewriter.

Paley seems to welcome activities that intrude on her creative time. She regards her writing classes at Sarah Lawrence College and the graduate school of City College as a gift: "Teaching always puts you in contact with new historical experience--not just with people but with the nature of their lives." Her political activities continue unabated. Most recently, Paley participated in a sit-in on Wall Street and a reading of poetry and prose on Writers for Peace Day.

When she's not being an activist she "feels bad," she says. "It comes from my terrible sense about the world. When I'm doing something about it I can bear it somehow. It seems the citizenly thing to do." That activism began in the PTA, when her children Nora and Danny, now 35 and 33, were attending P.S. 41 in Greenwich Village. "Local action is female," she says. "When I think back on my political self, it was related to integrating the schools, saving the trees on the streets, trying to keep the buses out of the park."

Paley is a second-generation radical. Her Ukrainian-born parents were both Social Democrats who opposed the czarist autocracy. Her father Isaac Goodside was arrested several times for revolutionary activities while he was still in his teens; he and his wife Manya immigrated to the U.S. in 1905 and settled in the Bronx, where Grace was born in 1922. "They were a fabulous generation," she says, and some of her best stories, like "Faith in the Afternoon" and "Dreamer in a Dead Language," are celebrations of her parents. Followers of Paley's fiction know that Isaac Goodside was an "M.D., artist and storyteller" and that his wife kept house--an occupation that Ms. Goodside's feminist daughter has never scorned. When her writing is going poorly, she takes refuge in housework. "I notice that men writers mostly go out of doors," she says. "What I'll do is start sweeping." And when the work is going well? "Life keeps distracting me." Fortunately for Paley and her readers, the little disturbances of woman have a way of adding up to major work.