And she has this way of saying things in an unconventional way, but makes perfect sense to me. Like this: I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night thinking about someone’s comment. It’s fun in a way, but in another it’s jangling. urn:lcp:badbehaviorstori0000gait:epub:9b5c14dc-a88f-4d56-8475-f9d481b7a693 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier badbehaviorstori0000gait Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t3dz8nx5d Invoice 1652 Isbn 9781439148877 It felt like he could have put his hand through my rib cage, grabbed my heart, squeezed it a little to see how it felt, then let it go." Stubbornly original, with a sort of rhythm and fine moments that flatten you out when you don't expect it, these stories are a pleasure to read Alice Munro

Bad Behavior: Mary Gaitskill (Penguin Modern Classics)

This book originally piqued my interest because of its purported similarity to the HBO TV show Girls, and also because Mary Gaitskill is scheduled to appear at a local college in a couple of weeks for a reading/book signing. For these reasons I decided to step outside of my admittedly narrow comfort zone, and give this a try. This is Mary Gaitskill’s first published work (1988) and is a set of nine short stories. The first four are from a male point of view, the last five from a female point of view. The themes are loneliness, destructive behaviour, sexuality, romance, love, drug addiction, sadomasochism, living in New York and aspirations to be a writer. The characters are often troubled, disillusioned or bored: teenage runaways, jaded sex workers, rootless businessmen. Discomfort and angst is pretty much a default setting and a great deal goes on beneath the surface. Inner conflicts are laid bare and the complexities and problems of human connection are analysed. Gaitskill writes from some of her experiences as a teenage runaway and she worked for a time as a stripper and a call girl. It is centrally about women’s inner conflicts and their response to men; whether lovers, husbands, clients, fathers and sons. There is an interesting tale about family life at the end which examines mother/daughter relationships. Women here seem to make better connections than men but there is always something just beneath the surface. The men are not cardboard cut-outs or stereotypes and there is nuance. Somehow the nuance makes the betrayals and the violence worse.He realized what had been disturbing him about her. With other women whom he had been with in similar situations, he had experienced a relaxing sense of emptiness within them that had made it easy for him to get inside them and, once there, smear himself all over their innermost territory until it was no longer theirs but his.” Masochist and submissive/slave are not the same thing. It was driving me bananas that she kept referring to them as if they were interchangeable terms. Article ("Mary, Mary, Less Contrary" by Emily Nussbaum) in New York Magazine (November 14, 2005 issue). 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.” The perfume of wealth graced her casually, like grass stains on the skin of a lazy child sleeping in a garden."

Bad Behavior - Mary Gaitskill - Google Books Bad Behavior - Mary Gaitskill - Google Books

I see how this collection about female sexuality and women who defy convention was goundbreaking 33 years ago. It's not that the topics don't matter anymore, but in a day and age where we have Ottessa Moshfegh, Melissa Broder, Virginie Despentes et al., these texts read like solid short stories crafted by a writer with a sharp eye and a real talent for emotional nuance, nothing more, nothing less. Gaitskill chooses a neutral narrative voice to talk about dominance, subjugation as well as the male and the female gaze, and the absence of moral judgement gives the stories a refreshing quality and renders them more challenging. Secretary follows the exploits of Debby, who graduates from a secretarial class and with the help of her mother, finds work as the receptionist for a fussy lawyer who punishes typing errors by calling Debby into his office and spanking her.The March 2006 Harper's had a notable review of Veronica by Wyatt Mason that also covered Gaitskill's earlier work. I love the writing you’ve done in the newsletter form, but it does feel at odds with what people like to call “the discourse.” There’s a constant push to reduce things to the most elementary dichotomies so everyone can take an instant and easy moral stand. And you can’ t take a moral stand without being … what’s the word? 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. Lily's presence in Virginia's life began as a series of late-night phone calls and wild letters from Anne. The letters were full of triple exclamation points, crazy dashes or dots instead of periods, violently underlined words and huge swirling capital letters with tails fanning across several lines. "Lily is so withdrawn and depressed." "Lily is making some very strange friends." "Lily is hostile." "I think she may be taking drugs ..." "Think she needs help--George is resisting--may need recommendation of a counselor." I have always preferred wine over beer. And then I had sour beer, and I fell in love. I skipped dating, the awkwardness of that first sex, and went straight to love. I have always preferred the novel over short stories. And then I read Mary Gaitskill’s “Bad Behavior,” and I fell in love. Gaitskill turns me on. But, not like you think. She is deliberate, and masterful in her use of language, often her sentences were dizzying in their effect upon me. Several times I found myself jarred from my reading reverie by a particular turn of phrase, or word choice. One character finds upon waking from a dream he has a “mosquito-bite feeling of loss” (77) and instantly I could, in a most odd way, understand the level he was feeling. In another story Lisette, a prostitute walks towards a client “as if he were a dentist, except she was smiling” seemingly incongruent within the stories space, it pitch-perfectly depicts a feeling, and our understanding.