美國當代短篇小說家格瑞思．裴莉的作品可歸屬於二十世紀末的都會文學。在她的三部短篇小說集中，包括《人世間的小紛擾》、《最後一刻的劇變》和《這些一成不變的日子》，都呈現出一系列不可自拔的女性情感劇。裴莉都會傳奇中的女性大多是連母親角色都扮演不好的棄婦，她們的兒女甚至迫不及待地要逃離她們的箝制。裴莉筆下這些看似失敗平凡女子，卻有兩種令她們反敗為勝的策略，是她們社交圈中的女性友人，再則就是「說故事」。換言之，女性相互敘述異於真實故事的情事敘述，成為裴莉女性角色發掘自我的心理療程，讓分割的自我再度歸回到共通俗成的成社會，重拾繼續生存下去的自信。
Grace Paley's fictional world shown in her three collections of short stories, The Little Disturbances of Man, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute and Later the Same Day, is a kind of late twentieth-century urban literature which provides a series of melodramas of beset womanhood. In Paley's urban romances, women characters are systematically deserted by their men, and even motherhood proves a failure. Their children simply could not wait to move out of their mother's lives. Women are left only with memories, blended with a general feeling of longing and frustration. However, there are two elements in the survival guides of Paley's women: women's friends in the community and storytelling. In other words, the little hope Paley's characters have to fight against the odds of life is to retell their life stories, to bring their "revised" perception of their misfortune to other women as well as to themselves and, with that they hope to redeliver the meaning of lives in order to amend their lost humanity. After all, stories talked in communities reconstruct women's emotional bonds and torn families. That is to say storytelling becomes a process of discovery, and a making of selves in relation to others, to a community of belief, and to a community of shared values.
