Bad Behavior: Stories

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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. Just a little pinch … there we go.” He grabbed her lip and wriggled it. “You feel great, don’t you? I bet we could take all your teeth out today and that would be fine with you. But of course, we’re not going to do that.” He patted Connie’s shoulder. “It’s just a small job that won’t take a minute.”

Mary Gaitskill - Wikipedia

urn:lcp:badbehaviorstori0000gait:epub:9b5c14dc-a88f-4d56-8475-f9d481b7a693 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier badbehaviorstori0000gait Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t3dz8nx5d Invoice 1652 Isbn 9781439148877 It's hard not to see how Gaitskill is trying to highlight the similarities in the female experience. The ideas of beauty, youth, ugliness and love are not only totally upended, but sometimes exposed as something not even real. Wanting to take the relationship further, he begins fantasising about seeing her outside of her workplace. 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). [11]

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The strangeness of it all delighted and fascinated him: the falsely gentle voice, the helpless contempt, the choosing of a bored, unknown girl sitting on her ankle, looking out the window." That was almost a decade ago. Now, I read the stories differently, but I love them no less. Actually, I love them more. What appeals to me these days is no longer the titillating content, or even the brazen selfhood of the female characters (though I’m still into both of those things). What I appreciate most now is something much more essential to the work, and to life: bare, unromantic emotional realism. That is, in these stories, very little changes. Epiphanies and emotional breakthroughs are rare, but small meannesses are common. People are utterly unknowable to one another. They are often too tired to even try. These seem to me to represent essential realities about the world that are often glossed over, ignored, or rewritten in fiction—particularly the epiphany-based fiction that has until recently been the widely accepted norm. Most times, these stories eschew character, plot, setting, metaphor, or really doing much deeper work of examination in psychology, theme, motif, etc. beyond these characters have fantasies/sexual deviant behaviors/make weird decisions. They don't internalize much. They don't seem to have motive. They don't consider other options, other characters, themselves. There's emptiness within, without, leaving the stories as kind of just as pointless relics.

BAD BEHAVIOR: STORIES Read Online Free Without Download - PDF BAD BEHAVIOR: STORIES Read Online Free Without Download - PDF

the entire time I was reading this, this song was in my head on a loop: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFRSaw... 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. Despite their mutual ill humor, they fornicated again, mostly because they could more easily ignore each other while doing so.” 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." [8] 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.The March 2006 Harper's had a notable review of Veronica by Wyatt Mason that also covered Gaitskill's earlier work. 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. Secretary follows the exploits of Debby, who graduates from a secretarial class and with the help of her mother, finds work as the receptionist for a fussy lawyer who punishes typing errors by calling Debby into his office and spanking her.

Bad behavior : stories : Gaitskill, Mary, 1954- : Free Bad behavior : stories : Gaitskill, Mary, 1954- : Free

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. 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 Again, the TV announced, “Now we're this instead of that! Now we walk like this, not like that!” Like people were all runny and liquid, running over this surface and that, looking for a container to hold everything in place, trying one thing, then the next, incessantly looking for the right one.The first Mary Gaitskill stories--including the famous 'Secretary' of the James Saper infamous movie of same name--and in many ways, her very bets writing. IMHO, Gaitskill has few rivals in modern American short story writing. Not only is she fearless (even ruthless) in her examination of life, human nature and existence itself, but her mastery of the form, her choice of words, her collection of sentences, is simply stunning.

Mary Gaitskill: “The definition of rape has changed a lot” Mary Gaitskill: “The definition of rape has changed a lot”

All of the stories here begin with the notion of being one thing, and then often changing mid-way to pique interest. Oh, I don't know; I just found the whole thing annoying. It was also a finalist for the National Book Prize, clearly I am a grumpy growing-older-man with no patience for this stylish claptrap. Maybe it was a bad idea to read this during Thanksgiving weekend.

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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. Connie paused and admired the graceful interaction of the three long sesame noodles lying on her plate." 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." 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’s little to see how it felt, then let it go.” In one of Mary Gaitskill’s best short stories, The Agonized Face, a female journalist watches a “feminist author” read at a literary festival. The author begins by complaining about her biographical note in the festival brochure, which, she feels, has played up her past experiences with prostitution and psychiatric wards to make her seem like “a kooky person off somewhere doing unimaginable stuff”. But just after she has persuaded the audience of the unfairness of such a portrayal, the author reads a funny story aloud from her book, which leaves the journalist unimpressed. The story – about an encounter between a man and an older woman – is flimsy and provocative, where the complaint had been tender and serious. “She sprouted three heads,” the journalist writes, “and asked that we accept them all!” The feminist had evaded something important, according to the journalist, by changing gears so abruptly: “the story she read made what had seemed like dignity look silly and obscene.”