When Judith Arcana first approached short story author and activist Grace Paley about writing her biography, Paley said no. “She said she didn’t think there should be a book just about her” Arcana writes, “that her life was no big deal, that she didn’t want to be lionized.” Prepared for this response, Arcana told her that, “I wanted to write about her not as exemplary, but as an example: Here’s a woman, she’s a mother, she’s an activist, she’s a writer—and here’s how she does it.”
To this Paley agreed. And after years of interviews and research over the course of the 1980s and early 1990s, the first edition of Grace Paley’s Life Stories was published by the University of Illinois Press in 1993. But the book soon went out of print and remained so for the past two decades, until the end of last year when local political publisher Eberhardt Press teamed up with Arcana to release a new edition. “It’s not that I’m responsible for or to Grace, but there’s no other biography of Grace Paley,” Arcana says. “Which shocked me, because I thought there would be others after me. I looked before doing a new edition, because I thought, ‘Oh, surely somebody’s taken care of this.’ But no.”