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Article: Grace Paley's Life Stories: A Literary Biography. (book reviews)
- Article from:
- Studies in Short Fiction
- Article date:
- January 1, 1995
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1995 Studies in Short Fiction. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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In Telling Lives: The Biographer's Art (New Republic Books, 1979), Marc Pachter cautions the biographer thus: "To identify too closely with a life, to collapse into adulation, is to give up the distance that allows the writer to become something more than the agent of a reputation" (9). A personal relationship between biographer and subject is a mixed blessing: its advantage is access to people and to information otherwise unavailable; its danger is that, in Pachter's words, the "force of the subject's personality . . . binds the biographer" (9). Judith Arcana's biography of Grace Paley illustrates Pachter's point. Arcana's relationship with the subject, her family, and her ...