Bad Behavior: Stories

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Across from me, a meager girl with raw bare legs was crying against a big older woman in a rough coat. I am also much more attuned, these days, to the enduring excellence of Gaitskill’s prose and her storytelling ability. Mary Gaitskill's tales of desire and dislocation in 1980s New York caused a sensation with their frank, caustic portrayals of men and women's inner lives. For some reason, I remembered the time, a few years before, when my mother had taken me to see a psychiatrist. When Caitlin tells him that spanking is her kink, he sends her a clip from an old western in which John Wayne spanks an actress.

Veronica by Mary Gaitskill | Goodreads Veronica by Mary Gaitskill | Goodreads

The plot is somewhat beside the point (there isn't really one anyway) as its structure relies on a frenetic assemblage of vignettes flashing between the 80's and the present, and my biggest praise for Gaitskill, is it's humane and unsentimental approach, mixing a cocktail of brutal loneliness with moments of raw tenderness, and she gets down and dirty when the story needs to be, Mary is not afraid to articulate the anguished thoughts and feelings from which we prefer to turn away. The great intellectual and ethical feat of the essay that follows – a project continued by This Is Pleasure – is its insistence on giving space to both the feelings of violation and the confusing facts. Gaitskill attempted to find a publisher for four years before her first book, the short story collection Bad Behavior, was published in 1988. I ask Gaitskill what she wanted to illuminate about Quin in that scene, whether his “genuine” expression came from a sense of encountering an authentic response, even if it was a refusal.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. Instead, these scenes are fleeting moments of connection and reprieve, and the characters can sense their end. I could see myself reading an essay about Gaitskill's themes and prose and loving that essay, but like Hooptedoodle, I just don't want to have to read it.

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

Of love, pain, illness, and rejection set mostly in 1980's New York, it's a richly metaphorical tale, set against the nocturnal glamorous tyranny of the fashion modelling industry, and unfortunately for some, during an eruption of AIDS cases. But she was not agreeing with Paglia and Roiphe; she was trying to show the fallacies in their thinking.

One thing is certain, it pays well, even if it means having to spend days in the company of complete arrogant sexist assholes. and her longtime friend Quin, a book editor forced to resign after a sexual harassment lawsuit is filed against him. The two main characters I eventually came to like, with all their issues and hiccups along the way, they were just two people trying to make their way in life, Gaitskill speaks an emotion that is easy to relate to. 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. So you’ve stepped into these big hot-button debates and insistently addressed that granularity, the specificity of each person, their particular experience, the social context, and their feelings about it.