With their loopy sense of humor, pervasive sorrow, and Lower East Side vernacular, Grace Paley's stories have earned her a permanent place in American literature. Now her publisher has collected almost three decades of essays, reviews, and lectures, which amount to cumulative, if oblique, self-portrait. "This is not an autobiographical collection," she writes in her introduction, "but it is about my life." Since Paley's life has encompassed not only literature but a long involvement in politics, there are pungent takes on the women's movement, anti-nuke protests, and Vietnam. Yet she's too hard-headed to write even a single sentence of polemical drivel; her political prose is always personal. Here, for example, she attends a Quaker sit-in at the Seabrook nuclear site: "I'm not very good at Friends meetings. My mind refuses to prevent my eyes from looking at the folks around me, and I'm often annoyed because I can't get the drift of the murmur of private witness. I did hear one young man near me say, 'May your intercession here today be the fruit of our action.' I think this means 'God helps those that help themselves,' a proverb that sounds meaner than it really is." And when it comes to literature and writing, Paley is tremendous. Her short essays on Isaac Babel and Donald Barthelme are themselves worth the price ofpurchase. In Just As I Thought, the author accomplishes exactly what she ascribes to Babel, producing "clarity, presentness, tension, and a model of how always, though with great difficulty, to proceed."

From Publishers Weekly
In this disappointing miscellany of articles, speeches, interviews, prefaces, transcribed talks and a few scattered poems, Paley only occasionally displays the sharply perceptive sparkle of her memorable short story collections (Later the Same Day, etc.). The pieces, written from the mid-'60s through the mid-'90s for magazines as diverse as Ms. and Esquire, are often slight, dated or predictable. Among the notable selections are her frank discussion of her two abortions, her 1974 meeting in Moscow with dissident Andrei Sakharov, her loving appreciation of Russian writer Isaac Babel's short stories and an account of how her mother, traveling by bus to Virginia in 1927, insisted on sitting in the section reserved for blacks. Also included are a polemic against the Gulf war, tributes to such writers as Donald Barthelme and Clarice Lispector, on-site war reportage from North Vietnam and autobiographical sketches about growing up radical in the Bronx during the Depression with socialist Russian Jewish emigre parents. One comes away with the impression that Paley's long-time grass-roots involvement in diverse movements?feminist, antinuclear, environmental, antiwar?reflects a unitary struggle for social justice. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Well worth reading, this volume collects essays, prefaces, and talks by peace and feminist activist Paley, born to a socialist Jewish family of Russian emigres in the Bronx in 1922. Paley writes with disarming frankness and humor, especially when her subjects are women, children?which, as she points out, include men?and herself. The reader sees her as child, married woman, housewife, mother, employee (phone answerer, typist, babysitter, secretary, teacher)?but through it all, first and foremost, Paley is a writer. She has been arrested more than once for civil disobedience, had an abortion, served in a delegation to Vietnam and, representing the World Peace Congress, to Moscow, taught writing, written poetry, become a grandmother, become an older woman?but she has not become old. In her work "Connections," she puts a personal face to war, AIDS, racism. Her words ring true when she writes, "I don't see any reason in being in this world actually if you can't in some ways be better, repair it somehow." Paley's stories have appeared in The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly; her poetry includes Leaning Forward (LJ 2/1/86). In 1994 she was the winner of the National Book Award for The Collated Stories (LJ 3/1/94).?Robert Kelly, Fort Wayne Community Schs., Ind.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The Boston Globe, Robert Taylor
What gives this collection its verve ... is the same quality that makes the stories interesting--the highly personal spin Paley puts on the material.

From Booklist
Paley has constructed a mosaic out of her nonfiction writings that doesn't exactly add up to an autobiography but that definitely reflects the most salient characteristics of her life: her Jewish, Socialist, Bronx childhood; her vitality, outspokenness, and largesse of spirit. And these essays, articles, and talks track not only a lifetime of social conscientiousness but also the evolution of various human rights movements. Paley has included articles about participating in antiwar and profeminist protests, serving time in jail, having an illegal abortion, and traveling to Hanoi in 1969, Moscow in the early 1970s, and El Salvador in the late 1980s. She has never separated the political from the personal or the imagined from the known, and so it comes as no surprise to find that her blunt nonfiction flares abruptly into dialogue, or shimmies into descriptions redolent with psychological acuity. Responding to an interviewer's query about her involvement with civil disobedience, Paley declares that her "general disposition has been disobedient, civil or otherwise," the spark for her immense compassion, unflagging activism, and searing art. Donna Seaman

From Kirkus Reviews
The inimitable Paley has already given us her Collected Stories (1994); now we get a collection of nonfiction, drawn from the past 30 years. The 50 essays, articles, interviews, and talks that make up this collection take Paley from her Bronx childhood, as the daughter of Russian-Jewish socialists, in the 1920s and '30s to her current role as an elder stateswoman of the American literary left. Although she claims for the book a strong focus on the dark days of the 1950s (the cloud of the Red Scare hangs in the background of much of the book), it might be argued more convincingly that this is a volume with its feet firmly planted in the 1960s, the decade in which Paley's political activism began its fullest flowering and a decade whose legacy of nonviolent activism is clearly brought to fruition in her subsequent antinuclear, feminist, and antiwar activities. Paley reflects on her life experiencesranging from work at a series of uninspiring day jobs to abortion, from being arrested at peace marches to sharing thoughts with comrade sisters like Kay Boyle and Barbara Demingwith the same feisty spiritedness and wry, dark humor that characterize her best fiction. She has an unerring ear for the way people speak on the New York streets and a luminous, humane warmth that animates her writing with its generosity. Some of the Vietnam-era political pieces feel a trifle dated, and some might accuse Paley of political naivet, but that is a refreshing change from the ugly cynicism of many of her opponents. A book to be dipped into repeatedly, if not read cover-to-cover, but a fine companion to Paley's memorable fictions. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review
"A feisty, passionate gathering of writings."--Elle

"In Paley, life, literature and politics converge--nonviolently, of course--in a cunning patchwork quilt of radiance and scruple, witness and example, nurture and nag, subversive humor and astonishing art: a Magical Socialism and a Groucho Marxism."--John Leonard, The Nation

"What distinguishes [Just As I Thought] from standard political fare is what sets her stories apart as well: Paley's genius for capturing the way people talk to each other across seemingly unbridgeable divides."--Alexis Jetter, Vanity Fair


John Leonard, The Nation
"In Paley, life, literature and politics converge-nonviolently, of course-in a cunning patchwork quilt of radiance and scruple, witness and example, nurture and nag, subversive humor and astonishing art: a Magical Socialism and a Groucho Marxism."

Alexis Jetter, Vanity Fair
"What distinguishes the latest collection from standard political fare is what sets her stories apart as well: Paley's genius for capturing the way people talk to each other across seemingly unbridgeable divides."

Elle
"A feisty, passionate gathering of writings."

Book Description
This rich and multifaceted collection is Grace Paley's vivid record of her life. As close to an autobiography as anything we are likely to have from this quintessentially American writer, Just As I Thought gives us a chance to see Paley not only as a writer and "troublemaker" but also as a daughter, sister, mother, and grandmother. Through her descriptions of her childhood in the Bronx and her experiences as an antiwar activist to her lectures on writing and her recollections of other writers, these pieces are always alive with Paley's inimitable voice, humor, and wisdom.


About the Author
Grace Paley is well known as a poet, feminist, writer, and antiwar activist. In 1994, her Collected Stories was a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in New York City and Vermont.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

This rich and multifaceted collection is Grace Paley's vivid record of her life. As close to an autobiography as anything we are likely to have from this quintessentially American writer, Just As I Thought gives us a chance to see Paley not only as a writer and "troublemaker" but also as a daughter, sister, mother, and grandmother. Through her descriptions of her childhood in the Bronx and her experiences as an antiwar activist to her lectures on writing and her recollections of other writers, these pieces are always alive with Paley's inimitable voice, humor, and wisdom.

FROM THE CRITICS

John Leonard

In Paley, life, literature and politics converge-nonviolently, of course-in a cunning patchwork quilt of radiance and scruple, witness and example, nurture and nag, subversive humor and astonishing art: a Magical Socialism and a Groucho Marxism. -- The Nation

Alexis Jetter

What distinguishes the latest collection from standard political fare is what sets her stories apart as well: Paley's genius for capturing the way people talk to each other across seemingly unbridgeable divides. -- Vanity Fair

Elle