Impressions

A Conversation With My Father - Grace Paley and Happy Endings - Margret Atwood

Both pieces are an introspective, solipsistic look at writing, and to a certain extent, the process of writing.

In the Paley piece, the author is asked by her old ailing father to write a "simple story", about "recognizable people". In the first draft, she produces a mere paragraph about a mother who becomes a junkie to befriend her own son, who later leaves, leaving his mother lonely and depressed. The author's father (the reader) correctly criticizes her for not creating a character, and for just a scant mention of a setting. "But it's not a five minute job", she admonishes (and warning readers who would have thought otherwise) and produces a second draft, in which she adds a lot of details, and turns it into a viable short story. But it is the same story, and to her father (and to the reader) it could hardly be characterized as a "simple story" about "recognizable people". The next question that arises is about knowing who the writer's audience is, and the sense of responsibility that the writer feels for the characters that she creates.

The Atwood piece is even more direct, without a "plot" a la Paley's conversation with her father. Six slightly varying stories are presented to the reader. In the simplest one, John and Mary fall in love, get married, have kids, have a happy life, and then they die. The story has a happy ending in that nothing bad happens. But it is not a story, or at least, not a very interesting one, precisely because nothing happens, there is no conflict, there are no characters, there is no setting, there is no dialogue, there is nothing.

In another story, John is an asshole and Mary commits suicide. John marries Madge and they live happily ever after. This does not constitute a happy ending. Because the story was about Mary (or the story became about Mary) and she does not meet with a happy fate.

Every story has an end, but it may not be the end of the story that the reader reads. The reader may read on, beyond the last page of the book, and live the lives of the characters she liked. If the book is about mortal humans, inevitably, the story's logical conclusion has to be that all the characters in the books will one day die. But that is not why readers read, nor why writers write. It is the life of the characters that makes the reading interesting, and the how and the why of their stories, and the beginning of the story that is all important. The ending hardly matters.

It's easy to draw a parallel between these pieces and "If on a winter's night a traveller..." by Italo Calvino.