Bad Behavior: Stories

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The novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin follows the childhood and adult lives of Justine Shade (thin) and Dorothy Never (fat). Justine works through her sadomasochistic issues while Dorothy works through her up-and-down commitment to the philosophy of "Definitism" and its founder "Anna Granite" (thinly veiled satires of Objectivism and Ayn Rand). When journalist Justine interviews Dorothy for an exposé of Definitism, an unusual relationship begins between the two women. In an interview, Gaitskill discussed what she was trying to convey about Justine via her sadomasochistic impulses:

Bad Behavior: Stories by Mary Gaitskill | Goodreads Bad Behavior: Stories by Mary Gaitskill | Goodreads

For Gaitskill, the solutions to loneliness and the cruelty it so often prompts are honesty, vulnerability, and recognition; this is the underlying moral vision that courses through her fiction. Gaitskill may be a secular writer, but there is something almost religious in the way she depicts human frailty. It’s common—indeed, inevitable—and cannot be barred or banned or legislated away; it can only be viewed, unblinkingly. And sometimes, after enough thought and time, forgiven. 28 In one of Mary Gaitskill’s best short stories, The Agonized Face, a female journalist watches a “feminist author” read at a literary festival. The author begins by complaining about her biographical note in the festival brochure, which, she feels, has played up her past experiences with prostitution and psychiatric wards to make her seem like “a kooky person off somewhere doing unimaginable stuff”. But just after she has persuaded the audience of the unfairness of such a portrayal, the author reads a funny story aloud from her book, which leaves the journalist unimpressed. The story – about an encounter between a man and an older woman – is flimsy and provocative, where the complaint had been tender and serious. “She sprouted three heads,” the journalist writes, “and asked that we accept them all!” The feminist had evaded something important, according to the journalist, by changing gears so abruptly: “the story she read made what had seemed like dignity look silly and obscene.” With this book, Gaitskill explains, she wanted to approach the familiar narratives of the #MeToo movement – “the bigger story that has been splattered all over the media and social media” – from a more intimate, nuanced perspective: “The subject, the way I’ve told it, is a very private story, from the inside point of view,” she says. “[Having] two people was a way to contain it [and] there was a beauty in containment, because the thing about the bigger story … is that you see the currents, but you often don’t see people really feeling it.” In confusion, she withdrew from all these things, which were, after all, only the substance of her life, and viewed them from a distance. Job, social life, relationship. Could these really be the things she did every day? What place was she in now, what was this distance from which they all looked so appalling? It felt like a blank space, silent and empty, so lonely that if she hadn’t remembered it was all nitrous oxide–induced, she might’ve cried.There are a lot of barbecues in "Heaven," and there are plastic chairs and even some dripping juice. And the point-of-view character, Virginia, is a mom, in her fifties, of four grown children. And while I'm not sure if she ever displays the near-psychotic complacency I vaguely remembered from my first reading of the story, she is definitely not the sort of person who is given to neurotic self-doubt, either. Instead, she is a former popular girl who has always been tall and blond and good-looking. She's not a worrywart or someone who especially seems even to analyze situations. In short, she's kind of an unusual POV character for fiction, and I love that. Gaitskill attempted to find a publisher for four years before her first book, the short story collection Bad Behavior, was published in 1988. The first four stories are written in the third person point of view primarily from the perspectives of male characters (the 2nd story "A Romantic Weekend," is split between one male and one female character's point of view). The remaining five stories are written from the perspectives of female characters. Secretary is the only story in the book written in the first-person point of view. Several of the stories have themes of sexuality, romance, love, sex work, sadomasochism, drug addiction, being a writer in New York City, and living in New York City. A Romantic Weekend and Secretary both explore themes of BDSM and psychological aspects of dominance and submission in sexual relationships. The story Connection is about a female friendship. [6] When I ask if Gaitskill ever considered structuring the book from the perspectives of accuser and accused she says no: “It didn’t strike me as very interesting. I felt like it would have been very difficult not to make [her] sound like a hundred other voices that have already been represented.”

Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill | Waterstones

Other Factors finds a literary magazine editor named Constance invited to a birthday by an old friend, dreading a reunion with a woman who rejected their friendship years ago. I've had Mary Gaitskill's novel The Mare on my shelf for a few years now. In my brain I had her filed under "Meh, she's a lady who writes about horses. Maybe I'll read her sometime." Turns out I had her all wrong. Second Reading: I often read bits of this book for inspiration in my own writing, and recently I decided I needed to read it again in toto. For a long stretch I was avid for the language, the literary firepower of Gaitskill's grim story about an ex-model, currently broke and ill with hepatitis, cleaning offices in the SF Bay Area for money and thinking about her life, her family, modeling in Paris and her unlikely friendship with a woman working the night shift as a word processor in New York, Veronica, a woman a generation older but having been similarly involved with questionable, fashionable people and damaged by them, contracting AIDS from her bisexual boyfriend in the 1980s. Most times, these stories eschew character, plot, setting, metaphor, or really doing much deeper work of examination in psychology, theme, motif, etc. beyond these characters have fantasies/sexual deviant behaviors/make weird decisions. They don't internalize much. They don't seem to have motive. They don't consider other options, other characters, themselves. There's emptiness within, without, leaving the stories as kind of just as pointless relics. Veronica by Mary Gaitskill came very highly recommended. It was on a lot of "best of" lists and I'd actually had it on my list of "To Read" for a while. This was a book that I couldn't finish and that is a real dilemma for me. When I'm not enjoying a book at all, I never know whether to quit or keep going. If I don't like it early on, I feel like I owe it to at least give it a chance, and keep reading. Eventually I'm half-way through and even if I still don't like it, I'm like, "Well, I'm half-way through now...." But this one I finally just put down.The children's young-adult and adult lives bring crises and surprises: each time, Virginia feels confused, like she can scarcely believe what is happening to her beautiful family; sometimes she suffers, and inevitably the crisis passes. The weird, unbeautiful niece haunts the story like a bad dream. Largely I think that she, and her mother, are there as a foil, so you can understand what kind of a woman Virginia is and how she sees herself.