I am here to talk about her new book, This Is Pleasure, a story about a scandal that I make the mistake of calling a novella. “I don’t consider this a novella,” she tells me. “Novella sounds like a cigarillo or something.” It is told from the alternating perspectives of Margot, an editor whose “professional reputation … was made [by] a book of charming stories about masochistic women” (sound familiar?), and her longtime friend Quin, a book editor forced to resign after a sexual harassment lawsuit is filed against him. The bigger story has been splattered all over the media ... It is a very private story, from the inside point of view I've had Mary Gaitskill's novel The Mare on my shelf for a few years now. In my brain I had her filed under "Meh, she's a lady who writes about horses. Maybe I'll read her sometime." Turns out I had her all wrong. Daisy's Valentine follows Joey, a clerk at "a filthy secondhand bookstore on the Lower East Side of Manhattan" who sets out to woo Daisy, a typist he's worked with for a year. Beloved by staff and customers alike, Daisy has widely discussed her romantic difficulties, unable to force her pitiful live-in boyfriend to break up with her. Joey's routine with his girlfriend of eight years Diane is just that: routine. The couple stays high on Dexedrine three and a half days a week and Diane can tell there's another woman before there is another woman. Joey spends days designing a special Valentine's Day card for Daisy, handing it to her a week after the holiday. Something else I want to point out: in the story “Other Factors,” Connie sees a dentist. “He did some dull, painful thing that caused a nasty taste in her mouth,” Gaitskill writes. This sentence, a perfect and perfectly horrible one, could appear in almost any of these stories.

Bad Behaviour by Mary Gaitskill | Goodreads Bad Behaviour by Mary Gaitskill | Goodreads

Now, don’t worry. I’m not about to tell you that Mary Gaitskill’s stories taught me how to live—or at least, not exactly. I mean, you wouldn’t actually want to live like any of the people in these stories, if you could help it. But like many young women, and many aspiring writers—young, female, and otherwise—I responded to Gaitskill’s stories instantly and intensely. I found them astonishing. I was seduced by the wildness of the characters, by their brazenness and force, even in the face of their own confusion, and often despite their inefficacy. I was interested and impressed, of course, by the amount and type of sex. Was this what adults were up to all this time? I never read a better description about what music meant in a period than Veronica. Found myself writing whole passages in my notebook. Deserved the National book award. With this book, Gaitskill explains, she wanted to approach the familiar narratives of the #MeToo movement – “the bigger story that has been splattered all over the media and social media” – from a more intimate, nuanced perspective: “The subject, the way I’ve told it, is a very private story, from the inside point of view,” she says. “[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.”

The children's young-adult and adult lives bring crises and surprises: each time, Virginia feels confused, like she can scarcely believe what is happening to her beautiful family; sometimes she suffers, and inevitably the crisis passes. The weird, unbeautiful niece haunts the story like a bad dream. Largely I think that she, and her mother, are there as a foil, so you can understand what kind of a woman Virginia is and how she sees herself. The image became tiny and unnaturally white, was surrounded by darkness, then faded like the picture on a turned off TV. Trying To Be concerns Stephanie, a frustrated writer who supplements demeaning clerical jobs with work as a prostitute. She begins an odd relationship with one of her clients, a lawyer named Bernard, who under any other circumstance might be a man she'd date. To her surprise, she receives a job offer from an architectural journal hiring an editorial assistant, but finds that a conventional relationship with a man who pays her for sex may not work. Recognizing fragility can also lead to different and more meaningful victories—another theme that runs through her short stories and novels. In 1997’s “The Blanket,” one of the sweetest stories Gaitskill has written, a 36-year-old woman and a 24-year-old man confess their love and commit to their relationship, but they can do so only after they have both admitted to the depth of their fear: the woman by telling the man that a particular bit of sexual role-playing upset her, the man by telling the woman how scared he is of losing her. In her first novel, Two Girls Fat and Thin (1991), two lonely women, both molested as children, find a tenuous connection, but only after one of them, a journalist, has published an unflattering account of the other. The book’s final scene finds the two women sleeping in bed together, a platonic echo of the concluding scene in “The Blanket.” 14

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

Yager, Carri Anne. "Mary Gaitskill: Critics line up to praise her work- and don't have a clue". College Crier. Archived from the original on 2007-10-09. This book originally piqued my interest because of its purported similarity to the HBO TV show Girls, and also because Mary Gaitskill is scheduled to appear at a local college in a couple of weeks for a reading/book signing. For these reasons I decided to step outside of my admittedly narrow comfort zone, and give this a try.I'm a true, dedicated, devoted fan of Mary Gaitskill--I will scout the 'Net for anything with her byline on it. Her words thrill me, her descriptions astound me, her observations leave me breathless. I've read every one of her stories several times. And even though I knew from the set-go that her first novel, Fat and Thin, isn't very good in terms of novel-writing (I actually think it fails), I still wanted to really, really like this book. Frustrated by the extremes she found on both sides, Gaitskill tried to plot a third course by looking with a fairly unsparing eye at difficult sexual encounters in her life, including two rapes. If she did not vilify the men involved, neither did she blame herself for being “stupid.” Gaitskill instead focused on the need for both men and women to better understand their desires and actions. Insisting that she did have some control over how at least some of these situations played out, she also recognized that ultimately she did not have all of the control. To create a world of sexual equality would require more than just rules; it would also require greater introspection on the part of men and women. 17 The March 2006 Harper's had a notable review of Veronica by Wyatt Mason that also covered Gaitskill's earlier work. It felt like he could have put his hand through my rib cage, grabbed my heart, squeezed it a little to see how it felt, then let it go." She presented herself as a case study. As a younger person, Gaitskill had trouble determining and then conveying what she wanted (and what she didn’t want), and she sometimes suffered because of this. She suggested that other men and women ran into similar difficulties. She was not responsible for other people’s actions, but her upsetting sexual encounters prompted her to reexamine her own motivations and desires. Gaitskill calls this “personal responsibility”—not the kind that Paglia and Roiphe wrote about but a self-awareness that helps a person protect herself and others. 18

Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill | Waterstones

I found this book on a list of the ten sexiest books of all time, and I should have known as soon as I saw Tropic of Cancer that the author was confusing "sexy" with "containing sex", but this contains the story that spawned the movie "Secretary"! Which I don't know if you've seen that but it's sexy. Gaitskill received the Arts and Letters Award in Literature from The American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2018. Gaitskill's other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002 and a PEN/Faulkner Award nomination for Because They Wanted To in 1998. Veronica (2005) was a National Book Award nominee, as well as a National Book Critics Circle finalist for that year. The book is centered on the narrator, a former fashion model and her friend Veronica who contracts AIDS. Gaitskill mentioned working on the novel in a 1994 interview, but that same year she put it aside until 2001. Writing of Veronica and Gaitskill's career in Harper's Magazine in March 2006, Wyatt Mason said: For some reason, I remembered the time, a few years before, when my mother had taken me to see a psychiatrist. One of the more obvious questions he had asked me was, “Debby, do you ever have the sensation of being outside yourself, almost as if you can actually watch yourself from another place?” I hadn’t at the time, but I did now. And it wasn’t such a bad feeling at all. There are a lot of barbecues in "Heaven," and there are plastic chairs and even some dripping juice. And the point-of-view character, Virginia, is a mom, in her fifties, of four grown children. And while I'm not sure if she ever displays the near-psychotic complacency I vaguely remembered from my first reading of the story, she is definitely not the sort of person who is given to neurotic self-doubt, either. Instead, she is a former popular girl who has always been tall and blond and good-looking. She's not a worrywart or someone who especially seems even to analyze situations. In short, she's kind of an unusual POV character for fiction, and I love that. Gaitskill's fiction is typically about female characters dealing with their own inner conflicts, and her subject matter matter-of-factly includes many "taboo" subjects such as prostitution, addiction, and sado-masochism. Gaitskill says that she had worked as a stripper and call girl. She showed similar candor in an essay about being raped, "On Not Being a Victim," for Harper's.While Gaitskill’s fiction is all about ambiguity, her nonfiction tends to be clear to the point of bluntness. In 1994 she wrote an essay for Harper’s Magazine, “On Not Being a Victim,” that was an intervention in the debate then raging over date rape. On one side, there was a growing number of feminists who wanted to establish clear rules for sexual engagement—rules that men would know and obey—so women would not have to experience unwanted sexual advances. 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). 16 Miserably, she tried to gain a sense of proportion. She stared at the flowers. They were an agony of bright, organized beauty. There might be a lot to argue with in Gaitskill’s essay, and certainly the argument she makes is out of step with our moment. But it would be a mistake to characterize her as a cynic or nihilist or someone who takes cruelty and pain for granted. Instead, Gaitskill wants us to better understand what motivates behavior—bad and good—and why people hurt each other in spite of rules and regulations. If she’s skeptical about the efficacy of rules, she’s remarkably optimistic about people’s capacity for self-reflection. The path she proposes in the essay is a more challenging one, but, she insists, it also has more potential to make lasting change. 21 The result might startle readers who know the original story best through its titillating and austere 2002 film adaptation, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader. Debby, the narrator of both stories, struggles to exorcise her feelings for the man who galvanized her sexuality and left her feeling exiled from ordinary tenderness and dignity. This isn’t the first such story Gaitskill has written in the aftermath of #MeToo. “ This Is Pleasure,” a novella published in 2019, describes an older woman’s friendship with a charming male publisher who stands accused of coming on to his female subordinates. Like all her fiction, it is thorny with complications. I think it’s less hard on me because of my age. It would be worse if I were 40 years old and this was happening. At my age, I expect to be a little bit out of the mainstream. If I don’t ever teach again, that’s fine. But if I were 40 and felt like I might never teach again, that would be really frightening.

Mary Gaitskill: ‘I don’t like the word ‘harassment’ any more Mary Gaitskill: ‘I don’t like the word ‘harassment’ any more

PDF / EPUB File Name: Bad_Behavior__Stories_-_Mary_Gaitskill.pdf, Bad_Behavior__Stories_-_Mary_Gaitskill.epub Carla, a dark, small-nosed girl with mascara-crusted eyelashes, entered pushing the familiar gray machine, and a cool rubber, none-too-clean mask was placed over Connie’s nose. “There we go,” said Dr. Fangelli. “Crank her up, Carla. We’ll let you get nice and relaxed. Carla, get the cream two-six base.” The stories are frank, engaging, often unresolved glimpses of tough experience, especially for the young female artist. All the characters are struggling in their own way to find connection, whether romantic or friendship or sexual. Their interior lives are richly portrayed. We are taken right into the intricacy of their thought and feeling with brazen honesty.

The stories in Bad Behavior often hinge on This Is Your Life moments on the streets of New York--the only city in North America where you can conceivably run into someone you dated or went to college with--but Mary Gaitskill isn't so interested in how relationships can fill a person with something new, but what they can take away or leave in their wake. Her stories are filled with ghosts, deviant thoughts, personal humiliations, the monkey shaking the inner tree of her characters that refuses to shut up. As infrequently complete as most of these stories feel, I was exhilarated reading them, with Trying To Be my favorite. I found this book so powerful that I couldn't write about it right away. I've had an ambivalent relationship to other work by Gaitskill (I'd only read her stories, not her other novel). I'm fascinated by it but sometimes repelled. The people and the situations often seemed ugly to the point that I wondered if an unconscious sadism wasn't at work. Then I'd wonder if that was only my squeamishness speaking. I also sometimes had trouble picturing her characters, who can be so contradictory that they don't even seem to cohere. Yet the writer's willingness to take on difficult subjects and difficult characters, and her strong prose, kept me interested in her work.