Ever since her explosive debut Bad Behaviour, Gaitskill has dealt with pain and intimacy, sex and power. She explains why it was time to address #MeTooMary Gaitskillīs fiction is often called cold, or even brutal, but I have always loved it for nearly opposite reasons: its tender attention to the complexities of human emotion, and the compassion it coaxes from clear-eyed perception. Ever since the publication of Bad Behaviour, her 1988 debut collection of stories, which has become a cult classic and inspired the 2002 film Secretary, her writing has been associated with extremity, cruelty and self-destruction. But framing her work in terms of its more sensational subjects, its masochistic women and arrogant men, threatens to overshadow its soulful explorations of the inextricable relationship between intimacy and pain, just as calling her work cold misunderstands the grace at its core. At 65, Gaitskillīs body of work spans three story collections, a book of essays and three novels, including Veronica - about the improbable friendship between a former model and a proofreader dying of Aids in 1980s Manhattan - and, most recently, The Mare, about a Dominican teenager and her bond with the white couple she stays with for several summers. Ever since Gaitskill first exploded on the literary scene - a teenage runaway from Michigan whose backstory immediately became part of her mystique - a generation of younger writers has been worshipping and wrestling with her authorial voice. Continue reading...
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