Just As I Thought.

• Author: Cusac, Anne-Marie
• Position: Review - Brief Article

When I was a college student, I came across this refreshing bit in the literary magazine TriQuarterly: "One of the things that art is about, for me, is justice. Now, that isn't a matter of opinion, really. That isn't to say, `I'm going to show these people right or wrong' or whatever. But what art is about--and this is what justice is about, although you'll have your own interpretations--is the illumination of what isn't known, the lighting up of what is under a rock, of what has been hidden."

The author of this passage is Grace Paley. At the time, I already loved Paley's short stories for their humor, their perceptiveness about women's lives, and their attention to the way people actually speak. But the paragraph that appeared in TriQuarterly seemed to uncover an intimate connection between writing about life and living it.

Twelve years later, reading Paley's book of essays, Just As I Thought (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998), I came upon the same paragraph and had a second experience of recognition.

Paley is a wonderful writer and, from all indications, gifted at living as well. The four decades of essays in this book consider her childhood as a young Jewish...