The book’s final scene finds the two women sleeping in bed together, a platonic echo of the concluding scene in “The Blanket. A boss, a harasser, victimizes his employee and at the same time spurs an important awakening in her. Our resources are crucial for knowledge lovers everywhere—so if you find all these bits and bytes useful, please pitch in. It was usually a predictor of literary success, but Gaitskill found it more a harbinger of frustrated promise. Gaitskill's 1994 essay in Harper's also addresses feminist debates about date rape, victimization, and responsibility.

Bad Behavior Quotes by Mary Gaitskill - Goodreads Bad Behavior Quotes by Mary Gaitskill - Goodreads

Margot holds a lot of anger toward Quin, and a lot of gratitude for the support he has offered her, the playfulness of his spirit, the singularity of his mind.Gaitskill is quick to point out that she’s not trying to excuse Quin’s behaviour – “I’m not saying he’s blameless” – but rather making room for shifting layers of feeling. But I’ve never heard of men, as a group, getting together again and again to attack women they’re related to. She characterized the film as "the Pretty Woman version, heavy on the charm (and a little too nice)," but observed that the "bottom line is that if [a film adaptation is] made you get some money and exposure, and people can make up their minds from there. Gaitskill considers the current feminist mode “rigid”, an inevitable reaction, she said, to a time when “the moral guide-posts were taken away for a while”.

Bad Behavior: Stories - Mary Gaitskill - Google Books

She remembers working as a runway model in Paris and living the high life as the mistress of the most powerful agent in Europe.Mary Gaitskill’s novel, Veronica, was nominated for a 2005 National Book Award and was one of The New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2005. On the other side, there were figures like Camille Paglia and Katie Roiphe, who insisted that women who made themselves vulnerable to violation were either stupid or naive (Paglia) or misrepresenting their experiences out of shame or regret (Roiphe). Having] two people was a way to contain it [and] there was a beauty in containment, because the thing about the bigger story … is that you see the currents, but you often don’t see people really feeling it. It was 4:00 in the morning, but when she saw how unhappy I was, she took out her tarot cards and told my fortune until it came out the way I wanted it.