At 19, Grace Paley left Hunter College to marry Jess Paley, a successful cinematographer. They had two children. Grace raised them while her husband traveled for work most of the time. The marriage fizzled, but she found her voice as a writer and at 37 published her first collection of stories. She did not formally divorce until she married again -this time to fellow writer , landscape architect and poet Robert Nichols in 1971.
“If I hadn’t spent that time in the playground, I wouldn’t have written a lot of those stories. That’s pretty much how I lived. And then we had our normal family life—struggles and hard times. That takes up a lot of time, hard times. Uses up whole days.”