okay, this made me feel better.
http://www.nerve.com/screeningroom/books/interview_marygaitskill/
What made Mary Gaitskill such an important and good-in-a-much-needed-way writer in my mind hasn't budged much as I've gotten older. It's hard for me to explain, but the crowning achievement to me is the seemingly unique faculty and facility she has with using sex as notational shorthand, a sort of objective correlative cut clear and precise without being glib or lascivious. She will toss off in the most matter of fact way something sexually explicit as a tool to understanding a context or a person's way more general (ie nonsexual) headspace. She has access to that as a tool in a way that still seems unreachable for most people--it's unique and important to me, though I completely agree that media response definitely tends to sell her talent short by getting hung up on the sex in itself. I also think she has a talent for capturing the fuzzy, mystery-amid-the-mundane profundity of childhood memories few contemporary writers I've encountered possess.
Nerve published her "Secretary" story way back when, for the record.
I lost my innocence to Mary Gaitskill; I think a lot of people did. Her first story collection, Bad Behavior, was full of high-concept naughtiness: women turning tricks in New York City, doing Dexedrine for days, getting spanked by the big bad boss and getting a big fat check to keep quiet. (The latter story became the film Secretary, which was a comparative Disney cartoon.) Her stories were told the way Debbie Harry delivered lyrics: matter-of-fact, offhand, but with sparks everywhere. Like Harry, Gaitskill's net effect was hard to process and easy to categorize. Maybe it was her openness about her past as a stripper, maybe it was her later role in discovering J.T. Leroy, but somewhere along the line she got this reputation as the Queen of Sexual Transgression, which sells her way short. Yes, her stories were about explicit, non-PC sex, but Behavior was more Catcher in the Rye than Catherine M — it was about being young and doing things because you need to and you can; time has made the acts less shocking but the humanity more evident. Her second collection, Because They Wanted To, achieved this from the start. Its highlight is the story "Tiny, Smiling Daddy," in which a man contemplates his daughter's lesbianism while he's waiting for his wife to bring the car back from the mall. In a half-hour monologue, it becomes clear that his outrage masks an entire life's worth of betrayals.
( Read more...Collapse )
What made Mary Gaitskill such an important and good-in-a-much-needed-way writer in my mind hasn't budged much as I've gotten older. It's hard for me to explain, but the crowning achievement to me is the seemingly unique faculty and facility she has with using sex as notational shorthand, a sort of objective correlative cut clear and precise without being glib or lascivious. She will toss off in the most matter of fact way something sexually explicit as a tool to understanding a context or a person's way more general (ie nonsexual) headspace. She has access to that as a tool in a way that still seems unreachable for most people--it's unique and important to me, though I completely agree that media response definitely tends to sell her talent short by getting hung up on the sex in itself. I also think she has a talent for capturing the fuzzy, mystery-amid-the-mundane profundity of childhood memories few contemporary writers I've encountered possess.
Nerve published her "Secretary" story way back when, for the record.
I lost my innocence to Mary Gaitskill; I think a lot of people did. Her first story collection, Bad Behavior, was full of high-concept naughtiness: women turning tricks in New York City, doing Dexedrine for days, getting spanked by the big bad boss and getting a big fat check to keep quiet. (The latter story became the film Secretary, which was a comparative Disney cartoon.) Her stories were told the way Debbie Harry delivered lyrics: matter-of-fact, offhand, but with sparks everywhere. Like Harry, Gaitskill's net effect was hard to process and easy to categorize. Maybe it was her openness about her past as a stripper, maybe it was her later role in discovering J.T. Leroy, but somewhere along the line she got this reputation as the Queen of Sexual Transgression, which sells her way short. Yes, her stories were about explicit, non-PC sex, but Behavior was more Catcher in the Rye than Catherine M — it was about being young and doing things because you need to and you can; time has made the acts less shocking but the humanity more evident. Her second collection, Because They Wanted To, achieved this from the start. Its highlight is the story "Tiny, Smiling Daddy," in which a man contemplates his daughter's lesbianism while he's waiting for his wife to bring the car back from the mall. In a half-hour monologue, it becomes clear that his outrage masks an entire life's worth of betrayals.
( Read more...Collapse )