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 view Veronica by Mary Gaitskill came very highly recommended. It was on a lot of "best of" lists and I'd actually had it on my list of "To Read" for a while. This was a book that I couldn't finish and that is a real dilemma for me. When I'm not enjoying a book at all, I never know whether to quit or keep going. If I don't like it early on, I feel like I owe it to at least give it a chance, and keep reading. Eventually I'm half-way through and even if I still don't like it, I'm like, "Well, I'm half-way through now...." But this one I finally just put down.

Veronica by Mary Gaitskill | Goodreads Veronica by Mary Gaitskill | Goodreads

Dr. Fangelli put some good, solid pressure on her tooth. “Carla, could you pass me the other drill?” Interview with Alexander Laurence (originally at Altx.com)". 1994. Archived from the original on 2016-09-21. {{ cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown ( link) 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'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. [9] 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 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

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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 Prof. Mary Gaitskill recognized by American Academy of Arts and Letters". cmc.edu . Retrieved 2020-01-04.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.” 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 want to marry Brian in a gypsy wedding," said Magdalen. "I want to have it on the ridge behind the house. Our friends will make a circle around us and chant. I'll be wearing a gown of raw silk with a light veil. And we'll have a feast."