Mary Gaitskill

Mary Gaitskill

Gaitskill at the 2010 Brooklyn Book Festival
Born (1954-11-11) November 11, 1954
Lexington, Kentucky, United States
Occupation writer
Nationality American
Alma mater University of Michigan
Period 1980s-
Genre literary short story, novel, essay, Transgressive Fiction

Mary Gaitskill (born November 11, 1954) is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories (1993, 2006, 2012), and The O. Henry Prize Stories (1998, 2008).

Life

Gaitskill was born in Lexington, Kentucky. She has lived in New York City, Toronto, San Francisco, and Marin County, CA, as well as attending the University of Michigan, where she earned her B.A. and won a Hopwood Award. She sold flowers in San Francisco as a teenage runaway. In a conversation with novelist and short story writer Matthew Sharpe for BOMB Magazine, Gaitskill said she chose to become a writer at age 18 because she was "indignant about things—it was the typical teenage sense of 'things are wrong in the world and I must say something.'"[1] Gaitskill has also recounted (in her essay "Revelation") becoming a born-again Christian at age 21 but lapsing after six months. She married the writer Peter Trachtenberg in 2001. They separated in 2010.[2] Gaitskill lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Works

Gaitskill made her book debut in 1988 with the short-story collection Bad Behavior, having been trying to publish her work since the age of 23. The first four stories are written in the third person point of view from the perspectives of male characters. The remaining five stories are written from the perspectives of female characters. Secretary is the only story in the book written in the first person point of view. Several of the stories have themes of sexuality, romance, love, sex work, sadomasochism, drug addiction, being a writer in New York City, and living in New York City. A Romantic Weekend and Secretary both explore themes of BDSM and psychological aspects of dominance and submission in sexual relationships. The story Connection is about a female friendship.[3]

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 herself had worked as a stripper and call girl. She showed similar candor discussing her being raped in her essay "On Not Being a Victim" for Harper's.

Gaitskill's 1994 essay in Harper's also addresses feminist debates about date rape, victimization, and responsibility. She describes ways that individual subjectivity influences all experiences, making it impossible to come to "universally agreed-upon conclusions." [4]

The film Secretary (2002) is based on the short story of the same name in Bad Behavior, although the two have little in common. 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."[5]

The novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin follows the childhood and adult lives of Justine Shade (thin) and Dorothy Never (fat). Justine works through her sadomasochistic issues while Dorothy works through her up-and-down commitment to the philosophy of "Definitism" and its founder "Anna Granite" (thinly-veiled satires of Objectivism and Ayn Rand). When journalist Justine interviews Dorothy for an exposé of Definitism, an unusual relationship begins between the two women. In an interview, Gaitskill discussed what she was trying to convey about Justine via her sadomasochistic impulses:

It's a kind of inward aggression. It seems like self-contempt, but it's really an inverted contempt for everything. That's what I was trying to describe in her. I would say it had to do with her childhood, not because she was sexually abused, but because the world that she was presented with was so inadequate in terms of giving her a full-spirited sense of herself. That inadequacy can make you implode with a lot of disgust. It can become the gestalt of who you are. So the masochism is like "I'm going to make myself into a debased object because that is what I think of you. This is what I think of your love. I don't want your love. Your love is shit. Your love is nothing.

[6]

The novel The Mare, published in 2015, is written from the perspectives of several different characters. The primary characters are named Ginger and Velvet (short for Velveteen). Ginger is a middle aged woman who meets Velvet, a young adolescent, through The Fresh Air Fund. Other characters whose perspectives are featured include Paul (Ginger's husband), Silvia (Velvet's mother), Dante (Velvet's younger brother), and Beverly (a horse trainer).[7]

Gaitskill's 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:

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.

Gaitskill's favorite writers have changed over time, as she noted in a 2005 interview,[8] 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."

Bibliography

References

  1. ↑ Sharpe, Matthew. "Mary Gaitskill". BOMB Magazine. Spring 2009. Retrieved 27 July 2011.
  2. ↑ Barrodale, Amie. "I'm Psychic... with Mary Gaitskill". Interview with Vice Magazine. Vice Magazine. Retrieved 25 October 2012.
  3. ↑ Gaitskill, Mary (1988). Bad Behavior. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-1-4391-4887-7.
  4. ↑ Gaitskill, Mary (March 1994). "On Not Being a Victim". Harper's Magazine. 288 (1726): 35.
  5. ↑ "Mary Gaitskill Interview". Failbetter. Retrieved 5 May 2014.
  6. ↑ "Interview with Alexander Laurence".
  7. ↑ Gaitskill, Mary (2015). The Mare. New York: Pantheon. ISBN 978-0-307-37974-0.
  8. ↑ Barnes & Noble.com - Mary Gaitskill - Books: Meet the Writers
Wikiquote has quotations related to: Mary Gaitskill
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 9/5/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.