Bad Behavior: Stories

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Gaitskill's favorite writers have changed over time, as she noted in a 2005 interview, [12] but one constant is the author Vladimir Nabokov, whose Lolita "will be on my ten favorites list until the end of my life." Another consistently named influence is Flannery O'Connor. Despite her well-known S/M themes, Gaitskill does not appear to consider the Marquis de Sade himself an influence, or at least not a literary one: "I don't think much of Sade as a writer, although I enjoyed beating off to him as a child." [13] Bibliography [ edit ]

Bad Behavior: Mary Gaitskill (Penguin Modern Classics)

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 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.I mean, I fight my middle age at every turn. But some days you're just cranky about things - younger writers, younger people. Younger subjects. Mary Gaitskill can bring out the crank in anyone. Or maybe just anyone my age. She is a terrific writer, and an adept wordsmith. And I sorta hated this book, and knew I should like it more. 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. 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 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 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.

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

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. My introduction to the fiction of Mary Gaitskill is Bad Behavior: Stories. Published in 1988, these nine darkly wondrous stories rebelliously refuse to conform; several involve abnormal sexual behavior, but not all. Several take place in Manhattan, but not all. Several are third person accounts, but not all. Several feature female protagonists, but not all. In spite of the eclecticism, I felt a thrill at discovering each entry, which felt like time capsules from the late 20th century, bottled with hang-ups and distractions that impeded happiness in a certain place or time. 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: 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. In her Harper’s essay, Gaitskill describes her evolving emotions around an unwanted sexual encounter with a young man in Detroit: “For some time after, I described this event as ‘the time I was raped’ … At times I even elaborately lied about what had happened, grossly exaggerating the threatening words, adding violence – not out of shame or guilt, but because the pumped-up version was more congruent with my feelings of violation than the confusing facts.” The great intellectual and ethical feat of the essay that follows – a project continued by This Is Pleasure – is its insistence on giving space to both the feelings of violation and the confusing facts.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.

Bad Behavior: Stories by Mary Gaitskill | Goodreads Bad Behavior: Stories by Mary Gaitskill | Goodreads

Lily's presence in Virginia's life began as a series of late-night phone calls and wild letters from Anne. The letters were full of triple exclamation points, crazy dashes or dots instead of periods, violently underlined words and huge swirling capital letters with tails fanning across several lines. "Lily is so withdrawn and depressed." "Lily is making some very strange friends." "Lily is hostile." "I think she may be taking drugs ..." "Think she needs help--George is resisting--may need recommendation of a counselor." Reading about her wary, lonely characters, one gets the sense the author knows whereof she writes. Her ex-husband, the writer Peter Trachtenberg, once wrote of Gaitskill, “I think I have never met anyone more lonely.” One imagines her response: Sure, but I’m in good company. In her fiction, loneliness is a universal experience, the thing that unites people across class divisions and divergent personal histories. And yet it’s also a great tragedy. When you feel alone, desperation drives your actions. A person might provoke or lash out or lie, all in the hope, perhaps even the unconscious desire, that she will be seen or even seen through—that is, recognized as a damaged but tractable soul beneath a well-wrought surface. 3 Through four books over eighteen years, Mary Gaitskill has been formulating her fiction around the immutable question of how we manage to live in a seemingly inscrutable world. In the past, she has described, with clarity and vision, the places in life where we sometimes get painfully caught. Until Veronica, however, she had never ventured to show fully how life could also be made a place where, despite all, we find meaningful release.I have always preferred wine over beer. And then I had sour beer, and I fell in love. I skipped dating, the awkwardness of that first sex, and went straight to love. I have always preferred the novel over short stories. And then I read Mary Gaitskill’s “Bad Behavior,” and I fell in love. Gaitskill turns me on. But, not like you think. She is deliberate, and masterful in her use of language, often her sentences were dizzying in their effect upon me. Several times I found myself jarred from my reading reverie by a particular turn of phrase, or word choice. One character finds upon waking from a dream he has a “mosquito-bite feeling of loss” (77) and instantly I could, in a most odd way, understand the level he was feeling. In another story Lisette, a prostitute walks towards a client “as if he were a dentist, except she was smiling” seemingly incongruent within the stories space, it pitch-perfectly depicts a feeling, and our understanding. 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