Mary Gaitskill: Part of the Process

Part of the Process is a series in which we chronicle the often turbulent, usually absurd and always interesting lives of authors we admire. It’s not easy to be a writer in the 21st century, but in a strange way, reading about the trials and tribulations of those who seem to have ‘made it’ can be a reminder that it has always been a difficult process.

Ever since Mary Gaitskill first exploded onto 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. Having played many roles - street vendor, stripper, flower seller, call girl, post-feminist provocateur - she may seem an obvious choice for this series. But most importantly, Gaitskill is an iconic novelist, essayist, and professor, a writer of powerful stories of desire, gender dynamics, the imbalance of power and human experience. 

Born on November 11, 1954, in Lexington, Kentucky, she earned her B.A. in 1981 from the University of Michigan and chose to become a writer at the age of 18, because she was "indignant about things”—it was the typical teenage sense of "things are wrong, and I must say something." 

Despite having a father who was a professor and a mother who read The New Yorker, how did she end up in a squat house at 16? Gaitskill ran away from home after her parents committed her to an asylum at age 15 to cure her "wilful" teenage behaviour. She hitchhiked to Canada, but minors weren’t allowed to cross the border, so she ended up at a crash pad in Detroit. 

There, she was sexually assaulted by an older man. In her 1994 essay for Harper's, "On Not Being A Victim," she spoke of this at length, including feminist debates on date rape, responsibility, and victimization. She talks about how individual perception influences all experiences, making it impossible to come to a "universally agreed-upon conclusion." She also speaks of how she had no clear way of reading the situation, either before or after. "I knew he was from a really much rougher place than me, and I felt compassion," she says. "And then I think he realised when he was on top of me that I was just a very scared 16-year-old girl. And then he became really tender, and that made me sad. I was utterly confused."

 These conflicting emotions make their way into her characters. Speaking about how traumatic the experience was, Gaitskill says, "At times I even elaborately lied about what had happened, grossly exaggerating the threatening words and adding violence—not out of shame or guilt, but because the pumped-up version was more congruent with my feelings of violation than the confusing facts." The great intellectual and moral achievement of her essays and short fiction is her insistence on giving space to the violation and the confusing facts. 

Despite how Detroit went for her, she doesn’t blame her parents. "Like many parents, they were frightened by the times as much as anything," she says. "It was 1969. The Manson family was in the news, and to my parents’ generation, it looked like teenage girls had lost their minds. They wanted to do drugs and have sex with strange boys. It was terrifying." Her aunt made a bonfire of Gaitskill’s jeans and put her own daughter in the hospital too. "When I left home a second time, they all just kind of threw up their hands," She moved around the country, describing selling flowers on the streets of San Francisco as a teenage runaway and doing various odd jobs. 

She was a born-again Christian at age 21, but lapsed after six months. Soon after, she worked as a stripper in New York to support her writing. Of her sex work, she once said, "When I grew up, I didn’t have experiences of adolescent femaleness because I didn’t do the normal thing with dating and all that." So, in a strange way, I got to act that out in burlesque. I could make fun of it and yet have the experience. It was like taking on various personas and throwing them off right away. "I felt that I was in control, and I didn’t feel demeaned by it."

 With her landmark debut collection of short stories, Bad Behavior, her writing career finally took off in 1988. She imbued her New York-set short stories with a harsh attitude and jagged lived emotion. Critic Michiko Kakutani described the world of Gaitskill’s books like this: "The hookers wear their hair in short, angry green spikes and try to discuss stories in the New Yorker with their clients. An air of Pinteresque menace hangs over these people’s social exchanges, and their sexual liaisons tend to devolve quickly into sadomasochistic power games full of emotional (and sometimes physical) violence." Her stories documented the shifting tensions between men and women—sex and violence, hatred and obsession—with an unsettling clarity and a steady hand.

 In one of the more famous of the stories, "Secretary", a young woman works in a tiny law firm where clerical errors earn her a punishment of being forcibly stripped and spanked by her sadistic boss. The tale was later adapted into a surprisingly bland film starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader. The scenario could run the risk of being pulpy, but Gaitskill made it both disturbing and full of complicated arousal. The cover of Bad Behavior showed a woman bound and gagged, submissive and defiant, while on her hands and knees. Gaitskill was immediately hailed as a post-feminist provocateur. Interviewers have confessed to taking off their wedding rings so as to not appear too bound by convention. 

Gaitskill has gone on to publish two further collections of stories (Because They Wanted To and Don’t Cry), three novels (Two Girls, Fat and Thin, Veronica, and The Mare), and a memoir (Lost Cat). She’s won many awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the National Book Award for Fiction, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. She has taught literature and creative writing at UC Berkeley, the University of Houston, New York University, The New School, Brown University, in the MFA program at Temple University, and Syracuse University. She was the writer-in-residence at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. 

 In an essay in Granta in 2009, she examined the destabilising nature of loss– of her beloved cat, troubling father, and her split with the writer Peter Trachtenberg, whom she married in 2001. Their involvement in a scheme that brought urban children from difficult homes in the city to live in the country (upstate New York, in their case) for the summer seemed to have prompted the split in some way. As of now, Gaitskill is back with her husband, and continues to document her singular interior life in essays and on a newsletter she started recently. 

Her 2015 novel, The Mare, is a meditation on the relationship between a woman (not unlike herself), an artist, and a Dominican teenager, Velvet, who comes to stay with her, as part of the Fresh Air Fund Scheme that Gaitskill and her husband volunteer for in real life. It expands into a story of Velvet’s relationship with a horse at the upstate stable she visits, and when interviews with people working at stables didn’t cut it, Gaitskill took up riding at age 57, groomed horses and cleaned stalls. Her character’s connection with the teenager she takes in was inspired by a real life relationship she had with a teenager. The most difficult character to write in the book was that of the teenager’s biological mother, since Gaitskill shared a tenuous relationship with her. “My sense was that basically she was happy I was there, able to buy them things. We sent them to a good Catholic school at some point. Once, her son was being difficult and we called her to ask what to do about it, and she said; punch him in the face, you have my permission. He was nine years old. But, I could tell she really cared for the children. I suppose she thought I was a silly woman, one playing at motherhood.” 

Gaitskill is still known for her radical opinions and provocative takes. On the idea of safe spaces, compared to the environment of the 1970s and 80s, she describes an incident with class of graduate students at NYU not long ago, after she made them read John Updike's Rabbit Run. They came into the next lesson outraged at how sexist the character was, and Gaitskill asked if they ‘really couldn’t begin to imagine a character that wants to run away from his responsibilities?’ Talking about the incident later, she says, “they looked at me like I had confessed to having sympathy for a murderer. When I at one point tried to argue that racism and sexism were not quite the same, I had people shouting, ‘gender is a social construct!’ and so on, so I said, ‘Go home and look between your legs and tell me if that is a social construct’, and then of course all hell broke loose.” Her novella This is Pleasure, from 2019, was widely lauded but also faced criticism for sympathising with a character who is a #MeToo offender. Still, Gaitskill has always remained committed to approaching the issue from a messy, intimate, human perspective rather than in a totalising way. 

Never one to shy away from controversy, she believes literature is hardly the realm for politeness or moralising. Literary critics have often chosen to focus on what they deem her ‘salacious’ life. She expounded on these frustrations in her essay, The Agonized Face, from her 2009 collection, Don’t Cry. In it, an unnamed “feminist author” appears at a literary festival and refuses to read from her work. Rather, she speaks about how she’s been villainized by the local media and festival organizers in brochures advertising her participation and her history of sex work. “They had ignored the content of her work completely, focusing instead on the most sensational aspects of her life—the prostitution, the drug use, the stay in a mental hospital, the attempt on her father’s life—in a way that was both salacious and puritanical.” The writer reminds the audience that isolating qualities that seem exciting, but maybe a little scary can deny a person their humanity, and makes us “impoverish and cheat ourselves of life’s complexity and tenderness.”

Here we get a glimpse into Gaitskill’s worldview and how opposed she is to moral judgement and how she possesses a dedication to capturing human contradictions that suffuses so much of her writing.“I feel more alien to book culture than I ever have, I think. Partly because of age. I don’t care much for the literary world. I think people basically accept me now. To begin with I was stunned at how rude people were. They would say to me, ‘Well, sex always sells’, or ‘It helps that you are pretty’. This was 30 years ago. Thankfully that doesn’t happen so much now. And I no longer have to answer.”

Mary Gaitskill’s quotes have been taken from various published interviews.