Bad Behavior: Stories

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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. Article ("Mary, Mary, Less Contrary" by Emily Nussbaum) in New York Magazine (November 14, 2005 issue). Mary Gaitskill is edgy, unsentimental, dangerously sharp. In this collection she writes about people who are in the dregs - lonely and reaching out for connection. She writes about people having affairs, people into S&M, prostitutes (lots of those), drug users, struggling artists. She gives voice to those on the fringe, their desperation laced with extra darkness. Something else I want to point out: in the story “Other Factors,” Connie sees a dentist. “He did some dull, painful thing that caused a nasty taste in her mouth,” Gaitskill writes. This sentence, a perfect and perfectly horrible one, could appear in almost any of these stories. 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]

Mary Gaitskill review – wide-ranging Oppositions by Mary Gaitskill review – wide-ranging

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.” 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. 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.” She presented herself as a case study. As a younger person, Gaitskill had trouble determining and then conveying what she wanted (and what she didn’t want), and she sometimes suffered because of this. She suggested that other men and women ran into similar difficulties. She was not responsible for other people’s actions, but her upsetting sexual encounters prompted her to reexamine her own motivations and desires. Gaitskill calls this “personal responsibility”—not the kind that Paglia and Roiphe wrote about but a self-awareness that helps a person protect herself and others. 18 I am here to talk about her new book, This Is Pleasure, a story about a scandal that I make the mistake of calling a novella. “I don’t consider this a novella,” she tells me. “Novella sounds like a cigarillo or something.” It is told from the alternating perspectives of Margot, an editor whose “professional reputation … was made [by] a book of charming stories about masochistic women” (sound familiar?), and her longtime friend Quin, a book editor forced to resign after a sexual harassment lawsuit is filed against him. The bigger story has been splattered all over the media ... It is a very private story, from the inside point of viewGaitskill 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 2nd 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 a female friendship. [6] Masochist and submissive/slave are not the same thing. It was driving me bananas that she kept referring to them as if they were interchangeable terms. 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

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

That knife-edge turn of perspective! That matter-of-fact dismembering! It’s so good. It’s so deft. I love it. Not to mention all of the work that the single line of the female character’s imagination is doing. Not a word is wasted here.In the end, she wrote This Is Pleasure (2019), a short novel that she says “is a #MeToo story”. (“I’m capable of being simplistic, actually!” she added, with a grin.) The book asks how we ought to treat those who are accused of wrongdoing. Quin, a middle-aged book editor, is alleged to have sexually assaulted multiple women. He is also a long-term friend of Margot, who considers him a better person than many of her female friends. “I want to try and understand how both things can co-exist,” Gaitskill said. “I do feel that it’s important to voice these areas of confusion, to not forget about them.” 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.” 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 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: He had met her at a party during the previous week. She immediately reminded him of a girl he had known years before, Sharon, a painfully serious girl with a pale, serious face whom he had tormented on and off for two years before leaving for his wife. Although it had gratified him enormously to leave her, he had missed hurting her for years, and had been self-consciously looking for another woman with a similarly fatal combination of pride, weakness and a foolish lust for something resembling passion. On meeting Beth, he was astonished at how much she looked, talked and moved like his former victim. She was delicately morbid in all her gestures, sensitive, arrogant, vulnerable to flattery. She veered between extravagant outbursts of opinion and sudden, uncertain halts, during which she seemed to look at him for approval. She was in love with the idea of intelligence, and she overestimated her own. Her sense of the world, though she presented it aggressively, could be, he sensed, snatched out from under her with little or not trouble. She said, "I hope you are a savage."

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

The stories are frank, engaging, often unresolved glimpses of tough experience, especially for the young female artist. All the characters are struggling in their own way to find connection, whether romantic or friendship or sexual. Their interior lives are richly portrayed. We are taken right into the intricacy of their thought and feeling with brazen honesty. 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. 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." An Affair, Edited is about Joel, a film distribution executive in Manhattan who takes a different route to work one day and bumps into Sara, a lover he from the University of Michigan. Hyper-aware of his prospects, Joel has yet to find a woman to accommodate him. He casually dismissed Sarah years ago and appears likely to do the same again. I cannot agree with the charge that Gaitskill is a bad writer, however (as suggested by a certain reader from Nottingham: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...). Not that the particular passage Paul singles out isn't bad; I just don't think that it's representative. Even in the stories that I didn't particularly like, Gaitskill's writing seemed quite impressive. (This worries me a bit, because Paul is usually right on the mark. Just not in this case).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, 2020), and The O. Henry Prize Stories (1998, 2008). Her books include the short story collection Bad Behavior (1988) and Veronica (2005), which was nominated for both the National Book Award for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Department of English: Mary Gaitskill". Temple University College of Liberal Arts. Archived from the original on February 3, 2017 . Retrieved February 2, 2017. 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. The March 2006 Harper's had a notable review of Veronica by Wyatt Mason that also covered Gaitskill's earlier work. 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.

Bad Behavior - Penguin Books UK

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. Virginia imagined the brat confronting her gentle sister. Another spoiled, pretty daughter who fancied herself a gypsy princess, barefooted, spangled with bright beads, breasts arrogantly unbound, cavalier in love. Like Magdalen. This is Mary Gaitskill’s first published work (1988) and is a set of nine short stories. The first four are from a male point of view, the last five from a female point of view. The themes are loneliness, destructive behaviour, sexuality, romance, love, drug addiction, sadomasochism, living in New York and aspirations to be a writer. The characters are often troubled, disillusioned or bored: teenage runaways, jaded sex workers, rootless businessmen. Discomfort and angst is pretty much a default setting and a great deal goes on beneath the surface. Inner conflicts are laid bare and the complexities and problems of human connection are analysed. Gaitskill writes from some of her experiences as a teenage runaway and she worked for a time as a stripper and a call girl. It is centrally about women’s inner conflicts and their response to men; whether lovers, husbands, clients, fathers and sons. There is an interesting tale about family life at the end which examines mother/daughter relationships. Women here seem to make better connections than men but there is always something just beneath the surface. The men are not cardboard cut-outs or stereotypes and there is nuance. Somehow the nuance makes the betrayals and the violence worse. Yager, Carri Anne. "Mary Gaitskill: Critics line up to praise her work- and don't have a clue". College Crier. Archived from the original on 2007-10-09.That resistance to simplifying the “messy situation” is part of what animates This Is Pleasure, though she tells me that fiction allowed her to write more directly about feelings: “That essay was more rational, talking about my mind more than my emotions,” while in the story, “what I’m writing about … is [the] women’s ambiguity about some of the things that have happened.” She refers to a scene in which Quin playfully spanks a younger co-worker, a woman who becomes one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against him. “In my mind,” Gaitskill says, “that girl in the story, she’s flirting, she’s joking – she doesn’t really expect him to do it. They go to lunch, they have a good time; she doesn’t really know how she feels until later.”