When I was maybe twelve, my mom told me that I wasn’t allowed to read her copy of Two Girls, Fat and Thin. I snuck it into my room and stayed up all night so I could finish it in time to put it back in the morning.
There’s the obvious thing about the way Gaitskill writes female sexuality. I used to worry that I was not only a sexual deviant but also the only person in the world whose darkest fantasies didn’t involve touch or even any straightforward kind of conversation.
My first year of art school, I was assigned some stories from Bad Behavior for a class on forbidden love for which we also readLolitaandGiovanni’s Room. I was sexually inexperienced in a way, but I just GOT Bad Behavior because the sex as a stand-in for something else and something else as a stand-in for sex was already so clear to me.
It’s not just a sex thing. Gaitskill’s characters are angry about the same things that I am angry about, and she writes bodies the way I see bodies. My relationship with my body has been so tumultuous and nearly fatal and I’ve moved through some of these sick body moments of my life with a strength that came from rage (vs. hunger or pride).
Her women are hungry: hungry for sex, hungry for pain, stiff from actual stomach hunger.
I don’t think I’ve met many women who aren’t hungry.
The movie version of Secretary was a mess. I actually loved it, but they missed the whole point by making the protagonist overtly mentally ill. That was a shit move, because her sexual deviance ends up pathologized. It’s not like the character in the story isn’t pathological, but it’s subtle. She isn’t seeking out some sort of replacement for the pain she can cause herself, because that pain and the terror of love barely are so unalike.
Recommended Reading: Check out Mirrorball, a story from Don’t Cry. It’s about souls (ghosts?), fucking, and the guy in that one band who will ruin you forever.
I’d recommend all of Don’t Cry. The stories are a little more experimental than her earlier work. I love everything she’s written and would recommend all of her work. Because They Wanted To is a good starting place, maybe. Veronica is stunning. There are a lot of adjectives in Veronica but it doesn’t bother me at all because they all need to be there.
Another good thing to read is this interview of Kim Gordon that Gaitskill did for Interview. I love them together.
Amy Silbergeld is the author of the auto-collaborative novel Rainn (Freke Räihä Förlag, 2014) and the chapbook Rape Joke (Tired Hearts, 2013).
Listening to writers read and discuss their work at Newtonville Books, the bookstore my wife and I own outside Boston, I began to wonder which living, contemporary writers held the most influence over their work. This survey is not meant to be comprehensive, but is the result of my posing the question to as many writers as I could ask.
ALICIA ERIAN: In college, my friend lent me her copy of Mary Gaitskill’s first book, a collection of stories entitled Bad Behavior, and said I should read it. What exactly that should meant wasn’t clear, but my friend was one of the best dressers I’d ever known, and this caused me to take her literary recommendations very seriously.
I connected with the disconnected misery of Gaitskill’s characters. They depressed the hell out of me, but they never bored me. I always needed to know what was going to happen to them. They mirrored my own emptiness, and from this I inferred that I had a shot at being interesting as a person, too.
Most especially, I connected with the story “Secretary.” It made me incredibly horny, and incredibly ashamed of being horny, since what was making me horny wasn’t something that was good for the main character, whose boss was sexually abusing her. At the same time, as a wannabe writer, I was aware that what Gaitskill had accomplished in terms of eliciting these conflicting responses from me was the apex of literary success. Gaitskill had revealed to me who I was—my basest instincts—before I’d even understood such things myself. I didn’t know her, but somehow, she really, really knew me. I hoped to offer the same experience to another reader one day.
