Gaitskill was born in Lexington, Kentucky. She has lived in New York City, Toronto, San Francisco, Marin County and Pennsylvania, and attended the University of Michigan, where she earned her B.A. in 1981[1] 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.'"[2] Gaitskill has also recounted (in her essay "Revelation") becoming a born-again Christian at age 21 but lapsing after six months.
Gaitskill attempted to find a publisher for four years before her first book, the short story collection Bad Behavior, was published in 1988. The first four stories are written in the third person point of view primarily from the perspectives of male characters (the second story "A Romantic Weekend," is split between one male and one female character's point of view). 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 the growth and breakdown of a female friendship.[6]
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.[7] She showed similar candor in an essay about being raped, "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."[8]
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."[9]
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.[10]
Gaitskill revisited her short story Secretary in 2023, not as a sequel, but as a retelling. Published in The New Yorker magazine on March 27, 2023, the second version continues with the main character revisiting her employer after several decades. In an interview with Deborah Treisman in The New Yorker, she explained what the main character Debbie feels:
The MeToo movement, though it's not explicitly named, has caused her to look back and think about her experience differently... in a perverse way, what the lawyer did awakened her and made her feel more alive than before or since. But that aliveness came at a heavy price.[11]
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).[12]
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:
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,[13] 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."[14]
David Foster Wallace was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and university professor of English and creative writing. Wallace's 1996 novel Infinite Jest was cited by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. His posthumous novel, The Pale King (2011), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2012. The Los Angeles Times's David Ulin called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last twenty years".
Eudora Alice Welty was an American short story writer, novelist and photographer who wrote about the American South. Her novel The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Welty received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Order of the South. She was the first living author to have her works published by the Library of America. Her house in Jackson, Mississippi has been designated as a National Historic Landmark and is open to the public as a house museum.
Nilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiri is a British-American author known for her short stories, novels, and essays in English and, more recently, in Italian.
Zadie Smith FRSL is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), immediately became a best-seller and won a number of awards. She became a tenured professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University in September 2010.
Susan Choi is an American novelist.
Veronica Geng was an American humorist, critic, and magazine editor.
Cynthia Ozick is an American short story writer, novelist, and essayist.
Bobbie Ann Mason is an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and literary critic from Kentucky. Her memoir was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Nicole Krauss is an American author best known for her four novels Man Walks into a Room (2002), The History of Love (2005), Great House (2010) and Forest Dark (2017), which have been translated into 35 languages. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, and Granta's Best American Novelists Under 40, and has been collected in Best American Short Stories 2003, Best American Short Stories 2008 and Best American Short Stories 2019. In 2011, Nicole Krauss won an award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards for Great House. A collection of her short stories, To Be a Man, was published in 2020 and won the Wingate Literary Prize in 2022.
Matthew Klam is an American fiction writer and magazine journalist.
Rebecca Margot Godfrey was a Canadian novelist and non-fiction writer.
Elizabeth Tallent is an American fiction writer, academic, and essayist.
Rivka Galchen is a Canadian American writer. Her first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, was published in 2008 and was awarded the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. She is the author of five books and a contributor of journalism and essays to The New Yorker.
Salvatore Scibona is an American novelist. He has won awards for both his novels and short stories, and was selected in 2010 as one of The New Yorker's "20 under 40" Fiction Writers to Watch. His work has been published in ten languages. In 2021 he was awarded the $200,000 Mildred and Harold Strauss Living award from the American Academy of Arts and Letter for his novel The Volunteer. In its citation the Academy wrote, "Salvatore Scibona’s work is grand, tragic, epic. His novel The Volunteer, about war, masculinity, abandonment, and grimly executed grace, is an intricate masterpiece of plot, scene, and troubled character. In language both meticulous and extravagant, Scibona brings to the American novel a mythic fury, a fresh greatness."
Peter Trachtenberg is an American writer of fiction, nonfiction, and memoir.
Elif Batuman is an American author, academic, and journalist. She is the author of three books: a memoir, The Possessed, and the novels The Idiot, which was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Either/Or. Batuman is a staff writer for The New Yorker.
Samantha Hunt is an American novelist, essayist and short-story writer.
Claire Vaye Watkins is an American author and academic.
The Mare is a 2015 novel by American author Mary Gaitskill. The story focuses on a young Dominican girl, Velvet Vargas, who moves to upstate New York to live with a white couple for a few weeks and her encounters with a horse, Fugly Girl, at a neighboring stable. The novel was partially inspired by Gaitskill's own experience hosting a child with the charity Fresh Air Fund and Enid Bagnold's 1935 novel National Velvet. The novel received primarily positive reviews.
Veronica is a 2005 novel by American author Mary Gaitskill. The book has been praised for its lyrical exploration of friendship, beauty, illness, and identity. The novel draws on Gaitskill's signature themes of emotional complexity, societal norms, and the nuances of power dynamics in relationships.
↑ Laurence (originally at Altx.com), Alexander (1994). "Interview with Mary Gaitskill". Archived from the original on September 21, 2016.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
