A Conversation with My Father

“A Conversation with My Father” is first and foremost a story about storytelling. It not only contains two embedded narratives within the frame story but also depicts the conversation about literature that gives rise to them. Therefore, it tracks the process that the writer uses to craft them. The story also contains parallels between the writer and Paley herself, which encourages readers to view “A Conversation with My Father” as a meditation on Paley’s own work. For instance, when the father says he “object[s] not to facts but to people sitting in trees talking senselessly, voices from who knows where,” Paley is criticizing a story of her own entitled “Faith in a Tree” (Paragraph 7).

These self-conscious references to the story’s fictionality are characteristic of postmodern literature, and they mirror the blurred boundaries between the story and Paley’s real life. Both encourage readers to think about the ways in which we are all constantly creating narratives to make sense of the world around us. In the opening lines of the story, for instance, Paley offers two ways of understanding her father’s heart condition: a figurative understanding that focuses on the heart’s age and fatigue, and a medical explanation that attributes the heart’s weakness to low potassium.