Bad Behavior: Stories

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The sun was evenly warm and pleasant and it seemed as though this was all anyone could expect out of life."

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

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. I'm glad I stumbled on this collection of short stories as they are my kind of stories. Set in a time and place that I idealise. However I feel they won't be everyone's cup of tea, as they often focus on dark areas such as prostitution, depression, suicide and sexual violence.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." Lccn 2009015579 Ocr ABBYY FineReader 11.0 (Extended OCR) Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.16 Old_pallet IA13260 Openlibrary_edition

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

SHE WAS MEETING a man she had recently and abruptly fallen in love with. She was in a state of ghastly anxiety. He was married, for one thing, to a Korean woman whom he described as the embodiment of all that was feminine and elegant. Not only that, but a psychic had told her that a relationship with him could cripple her emotionally for the rest of her life. On top of this, she was tormented by the feeling that she looked inadequate.” 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.” 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 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.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 And i was right, because in the end, this novel that-isn't-a-novel (there you go, typical problems of so-called post modernism!) didn't grip me, left me cold, at times bored me, very often irritated me, and left me wondering just where had gone the awesome Mary Gaitskill voice I'd been following for years. The result might startle readers who know the original story best through its titillating and austere 2002 film adaptation, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader. Debby, the narrator of both stories, struggles to exorcise her feelings for the man who galvanized her sexuality and left her feeling exiled from ordinary tenderness and dignity. This isn’t the first such story Gaitskill has written in the aftermath of #MeToo. “ This Is Pleasure,” a novella published in 2019, describes an older woman’s friendship with a charming male publisher who stands accused of coming on to his female subordinates. Like all her fiction, it is thorny with complications.

Bad Behavior | Book by Mary Gaitskill | Official Publisher

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.” 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. 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.

Table of Contents

There are a lot of barbecues in "Heaven," and there are plastic chairs and even some dripping juice. And the point-of-view character, Virginia, is a mom, in her fifties, of four grown children. And while I'm not sure if she ever displays the near-psychotic complacency I vaguely remembered from my first reading of the story, she is definitely not the sort of person who is given to neurotic self-doubt, either. Instead, she is a former popular girl who has always been tall and blond and good-looking. She's not a worrywart or someone who especially seems even to analyze situations. In short, she's kind of an unusual POV character for fiction, and I love that. I loved this book for the writing alone. It's musical in the way certain bodies are muscial, even if the notes are wrong. It's more than stream of consciousness, it's stream of unconsiousness, revilement, love, hate, music, poetry, debauchery, lust, loss. 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. The March 2006 Harper's had a notable review of Veronica by Wyatt Mason that also covered Gaitskill's earlier work. National Book Award finalist Mary Gaitskill’s debut collection, em>Bad Behavior—powerful stories about dislocation, longing, and desire which depict a disenchanted and rebellious urban fringe generation that is searching for human connection.

Mary Gaitskill - Wikipedia

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.

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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. The stories in Bad Behavior often hinge on This Is Your Life moments on the streets of New York--the only city in North America where you can conceivably run into someone you dated or went to college with--but Mary Gaitskill isn't so interested in how relationships can fill a person with something new, but what they can take away or leave in their wake. Her stories are filled with ghosts, deviant thoughts, personal humiliations, the monkey shaking the inner tree of her characters that refuses to shut up. As infrequently complete as most of these stories feel, I was exhilarated reading them, with Trying To Be my favorite. 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. 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] 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.