Bad Behavior: Stories

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The American author of Bad Behavior and This is Pleasure on sex, consent and why she refused to write a #MeToo essay. Dr. Fangelli put some good, solid pressure on her tooth. “Carla, could you pass me the other drill?”

Mary Gaitskill: ‘I don’t like the word ‘harassment’ any more Mary Gaitskill: ‘I don’t like the word ‘harassment’ any more

If you are going to write a whole book of short stories all starring the exact same depressed people having regrettable sex with each other and eating eggs at least put in some boobies. Trying To Be concerns Stephanie, a frustrated writer who supplements demeaning clerical jobs with work as a prostitute. She begins an odd relationship with one of her clients, a lawyer named Bernard, who under any other circumstance might be a man she'd date. To her surprise, she receives a job offer from an architectural journal hiring an editorial assistant, but finds that a conventional relationship with a man who pays her for sex may not work. 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 it go." And what about her critical reception – the way her work has often been read as cruel and unsentimental? “I find it painful and also confusing,” she tells me, paraphrasing Flannery O’Connor’s quip that readers who found her work grotesque had never been to the south. Gaitskill is suggesting that some people might find the worlds of her own fiction brutal largely because they are so unfamiliar, but part of me wonders if people call her work brutal not because of what they don’t know, but because of what they do know, and how difficult it can be to face certain kinds of knowledge. I can believe that someone might find Gaitskill’s narrative terrain exotic – a reader who has never been spanked, or been to a strip club – but I can’t believe there are readers who haven’t encountered the ways love inevitably holds pain. 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

Carla, a dark, small-nosed girl with mascara-crusted eyelashes, entered pushing the familiar gray machine, and a cool rubber, none-too-clean mask was placed over Connie’s nose. “There we go,” said Dr. Fangelli. “Crank her up, Carla. We’ll let you get nice and relaxed. Carla, get the cream two-six base.” It is a book that will inevitably be discussed as a commentary on the #MeToo movement it is clearly responding to, but the exacting rigour of its craft deflects attempts to extract a hot take of its gender politics. The very structure of the story – its dual voices and surprising vantage points, its forensic attention to fraught scenes rife with ambiguity – constitutes a formal rejoinder to the sweeping generalisations about “sexual harassment” that Gaitskill understands herself to be resisting. Even the phrase itself constitutes, for her, a blanket category that risks occluding the subtleties of particular encounters: “I don’t like the word ‘harassment’ any more,” she tells me. “That doesn’t always seem to be the right word.” A young woman anxiously waits for her date on a street corner in New York City; he sits in a pizza parlour across the street, watching her discomfort. I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night thinking about someone’s comment. It’s fun in a way, but in another it’s jangling.

Mary Gaitskill on rape, the internet, and the follow-up to Mary Gaitskill on rape, the internet, and the follow-up to

This kind of thing kept occurring all week. Each time, the lawyer’s irritation and disbelief mounted. In addition, I sensed something else growing in him, and intimate tendril creeping from one of this darker areas, nursed on the feeling that he had discovered something about me.” Stubbornly original, with a sort of rhythm and fine moments that flatten you out when you don't expect it, these stories are a pleasure to read' Alice Munro

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. 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

Bad Behavior Quotes by Mary Gaitskill - Goodreads Bad Behavior Quotes by Mary Gaitskill - Goodreads

He realized what had been disturbing him about her. With other women whom he had been with in similar situations, he had experienced a relaxing sense of emptiness within them that had made it easy for him to get inside them and, once there, smear himself all over their innermost territory until it was no longer theirs but his.” The children's young-adult and adult lives bring crises and surprises: each time, Virginia feels confused, like she can scarcely believe what is happening to her beautiful family; sometimes she suffers, and inevitably the crisis passes. The weird, unbeautiful niece haunts the story like a bad dream. Largely I think that she, and her mother, are there as a foil, so you can understand what kind of a woman Virginia is and how she sees herself. 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. Gaitskill doesn’t deploy the anecdote as a call for resistance so much as a call for more complexity in our stories. Immediately after the scene ends, she confesses that in the “original version of this essay … I didn’t mention that we became lovers for the next two years” and admits that “in omitting the aftermath of that ‘responsible’ decision, I was making the messy situation far too clear-cut, actually undermining my own argument by making it about propriety rather than the kind of fluid emotional negotiation that I see as necessary for personal responsibility.”Gaitskill gets so far inside the characters' heads I don't think it's surprising they're such an unlikeable bunch - who would you like if you know that much of their every thought and emotion? I have read other books where I didn't care for the individual characters but I've never enjoyed the ride so much. It was a bizarre world but one I felt it difficult to drag myself away from. But I was even more interested in the quality of mind with which Gaitskill imbued her characters. I had never read such chilly, sharp stories about women’s feelings. I had never read stories in which young women with what my mother might have called “questionable morals” were taken quite so seriously. Who knew, I thought, that women did these things? Who knew that they thought these things? Who knew that writers were allowed to chronicle these doings and thinkings? I loved the way the women in these stories refused convention, the way they failed to fit the female molds of goodness and kindness and beauty that had been presented to me as inescapable truths over and over again. I was, after all, working at a fashion magazine. urn:lcp:badbehaviorstori0000gait:epub:9b5c14dc-a88f-4d56-8475-f9d481b7a693 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier badbehaviorstori0000gait Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t3dz8nx5d Invoice 1652 Isbn 9781439148877

Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill - Book Review - Kristopher Cook Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill - Book Review - Kristopher Cook

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 With Gaitskill, you scarcely get or sometimes even expect popular opinions, regardless of whether she is riffing on Chekhov or the Clintons. She is seldom persuaded by groupthink, be it the “psychological uniformity of experience” that she decries in both “rape-crisis” American feminists and their critics in the mid-90s, or years later, the “hive-mind” that she feels is at work in the bestselling novel Gone Girl: “There is nothing here but ‘that guy’ or ‘that girl’, and that means nothing, period.” She defends John Updike’s right to be narcissistic, Norman Mailer’s impulse to be a “kook”. He had lunch with Cecilia that afternoon. They ate their corned beef on rye and cream cheese with lox in a diner peopled by waiters who looked like they´d met with utter disappointment and become attached to it.”After reading entirely too many phalocentric books recently I’ve decided to commence my “I am woman HEAR ME ROAR” summer and read only female writers for the next three months. I’m on my sixth female writer and so far I’ve encountered “Why roar when the man will take credit for it anyway?”, “What’s the point of roaring when no one pays attention to me anyway?”, “I’d roar if the men would do something for me”, “Ro..., wait never mind.” and “All men want is open legs and closed mouths”. I’m still in need of my female empowering reading!! I’ve read great books written by great women but I still need that ROAR with out the neuroses that come with it. 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 ] the entire time I was reading this, this song was in my head on a loop: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFRSaw... Gaitskill tells me she understands the need driving Quin as “a need for love, [a] very strong need to have women look at him, smile at him, be dependent on him, want him for something, want him to touch them. I could be wrong, but I would interpret that as a need for love. Maybe there would be men [for whom] it would purely be a need for power, but not in the character I’ve created.” And after a pause: “I’m sure some people would think that is too soft.”