Mary Gaitskill“It seemed to me that I was just writing about things that people deal with pretty regularly. I mean, not everybody has a boss that spanks them for typing mistakes, but many people have experienced the cruelty of office politics…”
It is Mary Gaitskill’s effortless ability to make her reader feel shamelessly excited and utterly uncomfortable with the honesty of her prose that has kept her in constant rotation with my favorite authors since the first time I opened Bad Behavior. For those of you who do not know, The 2002 film starring James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal, Secretary, was based off a piece from that collection, and it provided little justice to the characters’ audacity and distance.
A Kentucky native who has lived her life in myriad places, a good deal of which spent in New York City when it was an epicenter of the AIDS era, has published work in The Best American Short Stories (1993 and 2006), and The O. Henry Prize Stories (1998), The New Yorker, Esquire and Harper’s Magazine. She was also written several well-received novels and short story collections:
Bad Behavior (1988)
Two Girls, Fat and Thin (1991)
Because They Wanted To (1997)
Veronica (2005)
Her bold writing style had led us to survey prostitutes turning tricks, strippers, abortion, lesbians, shut ins, and sadomasochists Her own salacious past of exploration may have even offered insight to her work, “Gaitskill herself seemed like a character from her own pages. She too was a downtown girl and a waif, someone who had cashed out her twenties on a series of sexual improvisations. She’d sold flowers in San Francisco as a teenage runaway and worked as a stripper and a call girl.” No matter how or why her characters developed, her strength lies in the honesty that she provides with writing these stories. She is unapologetic and inspirational to all writers who want to tell you that story that you’re afraid to say yourself.
“The lawyer was a short man with dark, shiny eyes and dense immobile shoulders. He took my hand with an indifferent aggressive snatch. 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 go.” “Secretary,” Bad Behavior.
“He turned the edge of one nostril over with his thumb and nervously stroked his nose hairs with one finger. He knew it was a nasty habit, but it soothed him. When Kitty was a little girl he would do it to make her laugh. ‘Well,’ he’d say, ‘do you think it’s time we played with the hairs in our nose?’ And she would giggle, holding her hands against her face, eyes sparkling over her knuckles.” “Tiny, Smiling Daddy,” Because They Wanted To.
Yager, Carri Anne. “Mary Gaitskill: Critics Line up to Get Her Wrong.” College Crier Online.
Nussbaum, Emily. "Mary, Mary, Less Contrary," New York Magazine, Nov. 14, 2005
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