An Interview With Mary Gaitskill

Yasss Queen

Dear Republic,

It’s truly a privilege to be able to share an interview with the iconic Mary Gaitskill.

-ROL

AN INTERVIEW WITH MARY GAITSKILL

1.Did you always want to be a writer?

I didn’t seriously consider what I wanted to be until I was maybe 14 and then, yes I wanted to be a writer. It was the only thing I could do well and felt fully engaged by. Though I did enjoy painting for awhile I realized quickly that I couldn’t express myself well enough that way. Also I could not have afforded the materials while living as an itinerant teen or even as a tiny-apartment dweller in my 20s.

2.What were you like as a child? How, for instance, would your mother have described you?

My mother described me as difficult. I read her journals after she died and the phrase “I do not know what to do with this child” came up with some frequency. I was often terrified at night for example and would wake up screaming. She did like it that I was precocious in some ways, learned to speak in full sentences at nine months for example. (I mean very rudimentary sentences, like “I see the birdie.”) I had terrible tantrums but was also affectionate and extremely energetic. I lost that at a certain point because of social shyness and insecurity but between the ages of 2-10 I was a maniac of energy, like teachers actually complained that they couldn’t get me to sit still, etc. I loved music, loved to dance. In spite of the night-screaming I could be happy and easily fascinated by things. I was very emotional (I think most kids are?) but if something shocked me I could shut down completely. I tended to have more little boy friends than girls and liked boys’ games better than girls’ games—though my boy friends tended to be gentle girlie-type boys. This changed when I became a tween and boys began to seem alien and vaguely frightening.

3.It seems like you were always a reader? Do you remember some of the books that shaped you?

Those books would be very different at different times! Peter Pan was the Ur-book of my childhood—I still consider it a very beautiful work. Probably in early adolescence it would be Lord of the Rings though I also liked Lord of the Flies a lot! I went through a big Leonard Cohen-Margaret Atwood-Colette phase in my late teen years. But when I got more seriously focused I would say Flannery O’Connor, D. H. Lawrence in my early 20s, then Updike, Nabokov a few years after that. People despise Updike now and it’s true he wrote some real junk. But some of it, especially the early stuff, is fantastic, beautiful. Saul Bellow I discovered in my late 20s. Madame Bovary also, that book is a gut-bucket written with utmost refinement. I marvel at how he creates this banal, finally evil character and then makes you bleed for her.

4.Then there was a very bewildering adolescence. As much as I’ve been able to piece together from different articles, it goes something like this: your family is moving around a lot, mostly in the Detroit area; you usually feel unpopular and unhappy in school; then you go to a boarding school where you suddenly feel very pretty and popular but are quickly expelled for breaking curfew rules with a boy and also, it seems, some other offenses; then you run away from home a couple of times; then you’re between Toronto and California for a chaotic couple of years; then you’re back in Michigan for community college and then university. If there’s a red thread through all of that, it seems like it’s this sense of finding the social codes of the world to be very mysterious and finding your place in it bewildering as well. You express this very poignantly in your essay on “Sandrine,” where Sandrine seems impossibly, unattainably cool to you until you realize years later that she felt the same about you. Is this the kind of underlying sense, of the world looking very different to you than the world seems to look back at you — and then performance as a kind of bridge between these splits in perception?

I certainly found my adolescence bewildering—my parents were injured, highly sensitive people, without accepting or respecting their own sensitivity; they were often unhappy and socially ill-equipped so they raised children to be that way. Leaving home was the single best decision I ever made and I made it because my parents forced me into a mental hospital as punishment for getting kicked out of a school that I never should’ve been sent to. An awful lot happened! So yes, given my experience it was pretty hard to understand social codes as readily as my peers did. Your last sentence is complicated. Don’t you think that most people have some disjunction regarding their version of the world and how the world might look back at them? People misunderstand each other a great deal it seems. As for performance, as I said in a separate email, I’ve never been much good at social performance; it’s hard to do that if you are somewhat impaired in social language plus as an adult I really do not have time for it. It’s an interesting subject though. I had a friend who believed that most people spend their lives performing and they don’t know it. I don’t really agree, as performance IMO is something conscious. However, there is a subtle thing that happens that I suppose you could call a kind of performance, where one takes in the expectations of others and conforms without knowing it, adopting a role or persona because people seem to want you to do that—the housewife, the lover, the damaged soul, the serious author, etc. Again this is about social language and if these “roles” express something true in you that is congruent with your deeper self, is that performance?

Something that just occurred to me: I can identify a way that the world looks at me which is wildly incongruent with how I experience myself and which I might try to perform my way out of if I could see how. This didn’t happen as a young person, but when I started publishing; people would tell me that I was intimidating and seemed really tough, like the word “badass” was used. Sometimes I even got the message that I was “scary.” This was and is just incomprehensible to me. I am a small woman. I speak in a soft voice, usually. If anything I feel like I’m often timid, and when people talk aggressively to me I often react with silent bewilderment. I got this feedback at an arts retreat last year—how tough and intimidating I seem—and I actually asked someone, what are you talking about, how could anyone see me as intimidating? He said because I had a very direct gaze and expressed myself directly. That’s intimidating? From a small 70-year-old woman?????

5.What do you remember about writing the stories in Bad Behavior? Did they come easily? Not easily? Do you remember the first intimations of them? Do you remember feeling like they might be really good?

No writing has ever come easily to me and Bad Behavior was really not easy. I mostly remember feeling very depressed and very alone and having to force myself to write the stories. I had at that point not gotten a lot of positive feedback for my writing and always felt like I was working blind. In fact sometimes the only way I could continue was to say to myself, “It doesn’t have to be good. In fact it can be shit, it’s fine if it’s shit. Because no one is ever going to read it anyway.” It’s really amazing to me in retrospect that I kept going, I must’ve believed in myself on some level but it wasn’t a level that I felt most of the time.

6.And then there’s this long path to getting published, but once it’s published you seem to be recognized immediately as this major talent. What were some of the ways that your life changed at that point?

I was expected to talk more and to sound intelligent. This was at first very daunting because in groups at least my habit was to be very quiet; I had no idea how to talk or act in more intellectual settings. I remember being on a panel about something at some university, maybe Columbia. I don’t remember the subject, and after reading my prepared statement I just froze and said nothing. It was like everyone else was speaking in a language I didn’t understand. I wouldn’t have that problem now, of course, but then it really was an issue. I also had to deal with an unexpected amount of overt social hostility on occasion—I was completely unprepared for this and didn’t know how to protect myself. I was shocked because I’d had a fantasy of the literary world as this elevated place and wow, sometimes it is not!

But not everybody was a dick and eventually I learned how to develop myself socially, just basically everything expanded in a wonderful way. I rented a cottage for myself in Marin County while keeping my studio in NYC, an extravagance that cost me later, but was a wonderful way to be fully engaged yet hermit-like when I needed to be. That was a luxury I still look back on with gratitude.

7.Here are a couple of things that strike me about the Bad Behavior stories. One is this feeling — and I guess this would be the primary reaction I have to your writing — of trap door after trap door opening up, so that you’re constantly getting to another layer of complexity in a person’s psyche. This is Debby towards the end of ‘Secretary’: “‘I don’t want any elephant ears.’ My voice was unexpectedly nasty. It almost made me cry.” It’s like she’s going through this abrupt change, she’s seeing herself going through this abrupt change which she only half-understands. She takes a certain thrill in this new side of herself, and she’s also mourning her old self. It’s a lot packed into three lines. Is that what it primarily feels like to you — this sense of just constantly getting at greater complexity and ambiguity?

Thank you for the compliment and sensitive response. I like it that you have the trapdoor experience, it sounds great! But I don’t think it feels that way to me—I answer that way because I rarely remember how I felt when writing something—when I’m writing I’m focused on describing experience and thought/feeling as accurately as I can, and I’m not necessarily thinking in terms of ambiguity or complexity. But people are ambiguous and complex so I guess it’s natural that would be the observed result.

8.I’m also struck at how androgynous you are in your writing. It feels like it’s there all the way through your career, how balanced the perspectives are in, for instance, ‘A Romantic Weekend’ and then very overtly in ‘This Is Pleasure’ and in an interesting way in ‘On Not Being a Victim.’ Is that something you’re conscious of as you write or work towards? It feels very connected to this sense of always looking for complexity.

That’s an interesting observation. I wouldn’t say I work towards it exactly, it just seems natural to me to include the male perspective, it’s half the world. I am sometimes unsure if I’m doing it well enough, but I definitely want to do it.

9.Everybody asks about sex work, so I’ll ask about it. Do you feel that sex work helped your writing?

No more than anything else!

10.With all the S&M material, I take it in a similar way, as being very tightly connected to complexity. Sex writing always seems to have this problem that there’s the scene and then the scene kind of cuts out and there’s just bodies, but with S&M, sex becomes more all-encompassing, the power play and the interpersonal dynamics become the heart of sexuality. Is that how it felt — that there was a way that everything in a story like ‘A Romantic Weekend’ becomes part of a prolonged sex act?

You take sex work and S&M to be tightly connected to complexity more than other sexualities? I don’t. I think all human sexuality is complex. Full stop. I don’t know if one kind is more complex than the other; it depends on how it’s connected to all the other places in the person experiencing it. I think if there is a problem in writing about sex it’s that sex has nothing to do with words, like really nothing. And when you’re experiencing it you can’t analyze it or sometimes even be fully aware of what’s happening except for specific acts. (Even V. Nabokov said in a letter to his wife Vera that sex is one of the few things in life that can’t be described in words!) For some people acting like a mean asshole in a non-sexual way is part of a sex role, and for the person being treated that way it could also be sexual. But in the story ‘Romantic Weekend’ that’s not what’s happening. He’s being an asshole outside of sex and it’s not sexual for her, she’s just confused by it. I don’t think he likes it all that much either. There hasn’t been enough communication or connection for that to work. It would help if they were having great sex but they really aren’t.

11.I kind of assume that when your fiction first came out, it was seen as being part of ‘dirty realism.’ Reading your work, though, the emphasis on description and on some of the ancillary characters in a scene feels like it’s more Kafkan or expressionist. Here’s a description of a waitress in ‘College Town’: “She was a young, ungainly woman whose stomach seemed to be leading her around. She had a funny way of holding her forearms out in front of her at the waist, elbows bent, large hands dangling like flippers.” This feels more grotesque than realist, more the way that we see things in a dream than how we would normally perceive them. How do you tend to think about this balance between ‘realism’ and something that’s more like dreamspace?

Sam, that’s just how I see sometimes! “Realism” covers quite a lot, reality can be weird af. Sometimes if you just torque your perspective very slightly, people and phenomena become strange or even grotesque, especially when looked at unsympathetically; the woman looking at that waitress does not like her one bit.

12.You wrote I think the best essay I’ve ever read in ‘On Not Being a Victim’/’The Trouble with Following the Rules.’ Can you talk about how you wrote it — how you found the nerve to write it — and how it landed in the culture at that time?

Again, thank you. I wrote it because I was being driven nuts by the dialogue about “date rape” and responsibility. It seemed insanely self-righteous, judgmental and off in both directions. People were trying to talk about something very emotionally layered and situational—really vulnerable—in legalistic and rational ways that didn’t take into account the intimate nature of those situations. So I really went at it with great determination which I needed; it was the hardest thing I’d ever written at the time.

It was also really hard to get published. Before I wrote it, I reached out to editors of all major magazines and described to them what I wanted to do and just about none of them even answered me. The ones who did were perfunctory. I reached out to someone at Harper’s, I knew him personally, and he said, “There’s nothing more to be said on this subject.” He did take me to lunch and I tried to explain what I wanted to say but I guess I wasn’t convincing. So finally I decided, fuck it, I’m just going to write it. So I did and then I couldn’t get anyone to read it. Until I went to a different editor at Harper’s and he flipped, he was like, “We need this piece! We need it!” And it landed kind of beautifully. I don’t think I fully appreciated at the time how beautiful it was. People really got it.

Though there was a moment of bitchiness from the editor at Harper’s who wasn’t interested. I was at a big Harper’s event and this guy said to me, “So how does it feel to be at this important cultural blah blah?” And I said, “Like I represent a token female point of view.” He replied “You got that right.” See what I mean about literary culture?

13.You’ve talked about a period that you call the “dead zone.” This seems like it was much of the ‘90s and ‘00s. Do you understand why it was so hard to write at that time?

Actually looking back it was only one year that I didn’t write any fiction at all followed by two years where I wrote very little of it and didn’t complete most of what I started. (I can tell you exactly because I keep a log of what I’ve written during each year.). But that seemed like a long time to me. I had just finished a period of fairly intensive writing that also had a quality of working through or building some part of my emotional landscape and connecting with the commensurate place in the world. That’s very abstract but I don’t know how to put it. But I had in some way come to the end of that and had to wait before knowing what else to do. There were also practical reasons: During the year I wrote no fiction I was teaching full-time for the first time; I had to learn how to do that and it took up a lot of time. Then when I quit that I had to do a lot of magazine writing to make money. That took up a lot of time too.

14.I’m thinking about what makes something a “Mary Gaitskill story’ and here are a few additional thoughts. There does seem to be a moral in your writing actually, which is about ‘taking responsibility for emotions.’ In a Guardian interview you talk about the “fluid emotional negotiation that I see as necessary for personal responsibility.” In ‘Not Being a Victim,’ you write, “being responsible would have meant that I let myself feel whatever discomfort, indignation, or disgust I experienced without allowing those feelings to determine my entire reaction to a given piece of work.” To what extent is that ‘taking of responsibility’ at the center of your writing?

I don’t know how to answer this. I don’t think about it when I’m writing. Today I read an interesting piece about how LLMs like Claude, etc, risk changing the concept of responsibility for language, the way we are, or have been, expected to stand by what we say. Because an LLM is something that uses language very closely to how humans use it but in reality isn’t responsible for what it says and can’t be held accountable, for example taken to court because it encouraged a mentally ill adolescent to kill himself. Fiction has a more complicated relationship to responsibility that way than non-fiction because it’s not literally true. But nonetheless I do feel responsible for a kind of accuracy, to at least attempt to accurately describe whatever I’m writing about, be it a physical object or an emotional state, to illuminate it.

15.And then what also seems to be right at the center is this exploration of violence — of the question of whether violence is an external force or is kind of the determining feature of social relations. In Veronica, you write “all prayer is prayer to the giant teeth.” In your essay for The Point you “describe an alignment with a force of destruction that briefly exalts those who become its conduit.” How central is this kind of violence for how people interact with each other — and how central is it to art?

I don’t know! I would be suspicious of anyone who thought they could answer that question. In human interaction I think it would very much depend on the individuals involved and the situation they were in. Group dynamics are a whole other thing. Re: art I don’t have an opinion about it. It just popped into my head to say that art is the opposite of violence but opposites often have some relation.

16.Do you remember the circumstances when the Sophie Bassouls photo was taken?

I was in France doing a tiny publicity tour for Bad Behavior. All I remember is that I was very tense when the photo was taken, very self-conscious. I don’t remember why though.

17.You seem to write really slowly. Can you talk about the process? You’ve said it’s different every time, but maybe describe how you wrote ‘This Is Pleasure’? — just to pick an example.

I wrote ‘This is Pleasure’ very quickly, for me. It took about seven months to write the first draft, I let it sit for a couple more months and then did the next two drafts in 3-4 months. So it was about a year. That might be slow for someone else but it was fast for me. There are stories though that have taken me years and that were shorter than TIP. “Mirror Ball” (a story in Don’t Cry) took me three years. I wrote the first 6-7 pages really quickly and then struggled for another year, sort of creeping forwards at the rate of one, two pages and then putting it down, then finally had a big burst of inspiration in the third year. “Agonized Face” (also Don’t Cry) was even more agonizing. I wrote that one pretty fast at first, maybe 5 pages and then had no idea what to do with it. I would periodically take it out and stare at it and just feel stupefied. I started it in 1999, worked on it a bit in 2000 then just basically ignored it until 2006 when suddenly I looked at it one day and knew what to do.

18.Have you been comfortable/uncomfortable with money for most of your adult life? To what extent does having or not having money affect the way that you write?

I’m not good with money, don’t manage it well. I’m okay now but have gone through periods where I had trouble paying rent. This affected my writing in the sense that it limited what I could do; I had to spend a lot of time making money. Back in the 90s a acquaintance of mine, a professor at Berkeley, asked rather incredulously, why I wasted my time writing for women’s magazines. I said, “Two dollars a word.”

19.You seemed to go through a real shift in productivity around the time of ‘This Is Pleasure.’ Suddenly your writing was everywhere — and you were writing about politics in a way that I don’t think you did so much before. Did you make conscious adjustments in deciding how productive/engaged to be?

I think you’re mostly referring to my Substack pieces, I did a lot of those plus some New Yorker pieces, one of which was fiction. I was more prolific on Substack because that was what the form required, and what I wrote could be much looser and more relaxed than most magazine pieces, plus I had a lot of pent-up reaction to what was happening culturally—I would call most of what I wrote cultural rather than political, for example the incel phenomenon and natalism and the ways men are being portrayed in, for example, movies and TV. But no, it wasn’t a conscious adjustment. I started doing Substack frankly because they paid me at first but I found it truly inspiring for a couple of years.

20.It was really a shock when ’This Is Pleasure’ came out. I’m pretty sure it was the first thing I came across that dealt with #MeToo in a sophisticated, balanced way as opposed to just looking for heroes and villains. Can you talk about the calculus you made in choosing to write it and then in publishing it. Did you face any kind of backlash for portraying Quin as sympathetically as you did?

TIP was really something I felt the need to write. There wasn’t much actual calculus involved—well except I did think about balance, I wanted the reader to really be in an ambivalent place when thinking about Quin. I don’t think I got a lot of backlash, but then I don’t pay much attention to what’s online so maybe there was something.

21.And then you’ve clearly been very rattled by the ideological turn in the culture, and that you see in a lot of your students. Do you feel a kind of moral responsibility to stand up to that?

I don’t know if it was a moral responsibility but I did feel like pushing back about the policing of language and what seemed like a demonization of the masculine, what looked like undue fear of physical touch.

22.In one interview, you describe getting into an argument with one of your college classes in which your class is arguing that gender is a social construct and you tell them “‘Go home and look between your legs and tell me if that is a social construct,” to which you add “And then of course all hell broke loose.” Can you finish the story? Does that mean that you were close to being canceled?

No! That was in 2013, canceling wasn’t a thing at that point. A lot of people in the class just started yelling angrily and were mad at me for the rest of the semester. But nothing else.

23.Something that makes me a little sad when I look back at Bad Behavior or the essays in Somebody with a Little Hammer is a sense of the reading public and publishing landscape being these very stable entities — enough so that you can go into almost unbelievable nuance when you’re reviewing somebody else’s work or when you’re revising your own. I have the feeling that that’s largely gone — that it’s hard for writers now to have that kind of care and confidence because they don’t know when the reader is going to drift away to something else on their smart phone. Is that something that concerns you, or affects your writing, the change in the stability of a reading public?

I’m aware of the change but it doesn’t affect my writing because I’ve been doing it so long its identity is pretty solid. Well, on second thought there probably is some effect because I do respond to cultural hive-currents almost unconsciously but it’s not to the point that I worry about it. I would suggest that younger writers don’t worry about it either to the extent possible. But I realize it’s easy for me to say, I probably only have maybe 10 more years of writing life; I’d probably be more anxious if I was under 50.

24.How has your experience with Substack been? To what extent does your writing on Substack harmonize with the rest of your writing life; to what extent does it distract from it?

My experience with Substack was wonderful for two-three years. I’d never been on social media before or connected with people virtually like that and I was surprised at how fun and genuine it could be. It was very freeing for my style, I didn’t have to be as careful as I would normally be, could break a lot of rules, even my own. I could be more direct, conversational, choose images and media. It helped that I had a quite small group of subscribers at first, like in the low hundreds and that made it very intimate which I enjoyed a lot. At first I didn’t have comments turned on because most “message boards” I’d seen were incredibly stupid and hostile—but eventually I became curious and enabled comments, and wow what a nice surprise. My subscribers were so generous and intelligent and sometimes very erudite. I got into incredibly long, detailed conversations with them and they did with each other too. Sometimes these conversations were personal and, like I said, intimate. I felt like I was getting to know people who in “real life” I wouldn’t talk to at all because of standard social boundaries. For awhile I also had an interesting mix of people, like I even had a few Trump supporters who, it seemed, thought I was on their team because of some of my cultural leanings. I welcomed them because they were polite and non-hectoring and also I believed in that kind of cross-talk. Unfortunately that was one of the things that changed. I stopped thinking that it made any positive difference to keep that channel open and I guess they did too; when I came out and said I was voting for Harris/Walz, they dropped away in disgust. One of them actually became enraged by an apolitical post I did about instances of kindness I’d experienced in life!!! And he was someone I’d previously felt connected with.

Around that time I became aware that while doing Substack it was harder for me to write fiction, like I was barely doing it at all. So I started taking time off which resulted in more fiction. And then Substack seemed to change, become less intimate and more of a machine, with constant upselling and bombardment of “Notes.” It’s too much. And it just does not seem like the time for whimsical/speculative ruminations on literature or what have you. So I’m not sure I want to stay with it. But it was great for awhile.

Interview conducted by Sam Kahn. Photo (reproduced) by Tabitha Soren.