Bad Behavior: Stories

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I found this book on a list of the ten sexiest books of all time, and I should have known as soon as I saw Tropic of Cancer that the author was confusing "sexy" with "containing sex", but this contains the story that spawned the movie "Secretary"! Which I don't know if you've seen that but it's sexy. I bet I'd be really inspired by this novel if I were a fiction writer. Mary Gaitskill sees the world through no eyes but her own, and she communicates that worldview with an unyielding series of remarkably inventive metaphors and physical descriptions, interspersed with prose-poem reveries in which Gaitskill abandons standard literary psychology to focus entirely on texture. Heady stuff, and my inner creative-writing student is all fired up by it, galvanized. But alas, I am not a writer of fiction, merely a reader, with all the reader's selfish, automatic appetite for narrative conveyance. Gaitskill is less interested in moving from A to B than she is in wringing all the physical and emotional meaning out of A before collapsing, exhausted, onto B. Thus the book frustrated me as often as it thrilled me. For some reason, I remembered the time, a few years before, when my mother had taken me to see a psychiatrist. One of the more obvious questions he had asked me was, “Debby, do you ever have the sensation of being outside yourself, almost as if you can actually watch yourself from another place?” I hadn’t at the time, but I did now. And it wasn’t such a bad feeling at all.

Bad Behavior Quotes by Mary Gaitskill - Goodreads Bad Behavior Quotes by Mary Gaitskill - Goodreads

Trying To Be concerns Stephanie, a frustrated writer who supplements demeaning clerical jobs with work as a prostitute. She begins an odd relationship with one of her clients, a lawyer named Bernard, who under any other circumstance might be a man she'd date. To her surprise, she receives a job offer from an architectural journal hiring an editorial assistant, but finds that a conventional relationship with a man who pays her for sex may not work.And i was right, because in the end, this novel that- Often, conflicting feelings arise in the face of weakness. As Deana, the sage girlfriend of the brittle Connie, puts it in the story “Other Factors,” “It’s kind of strange to be confronted so aggressively with somebody else’s frailty. Some people will want to protect you, as I did, but some people will want to hurt you. Others will be merely afraid of you, for the obvious reason that it reminds them of their own frailty.” Weakness in Gaitskill’s work is both an enticement and a threat. People seek to exploit it in others, hoping that by doing so, they’ll expunge it in themselves. But rarely does this impulse get her characters what they crave: recognition, connection, love. 9 Department of English: Mary Gaitskill". Temple University College of Liberal Arts. Archived from the original on February 3, 2017 . Retrieved February 2, 2017.

Bad Behaviour by Mary Gaitskill | Goodreads Bad Behaviour by Mary Gaitskill | Goodreads

Connie paused and admired the graceful interaction of the three long sesame noodles lying on her plate." These are not, in any case, sexy stories. They're vignettes about relationships, set in sexy contexts. So the story about the lady who hooks on the side turns out to be more about one of her relationships than about hooking; same with the one about S&M. And "Secretary", by the way, is super different than the movie. It includes less sex. I don’t agree with that,” Gaitskill said, a statement that many contemporary feminists might find not just controversial, but potentially dangerous. “If you don’t even try to tell the man ‘No’, whether he personally asks or not, I don’t know how you can then say ‘I was raped’.” She defended this view by referencing the context in which she was raised: “Men would try to get women to have sex with them. That’s what they were expected to do. If you put up no resistance, if you didn’t struggle or say anything, I don’t think you could expect a man in that context to really know, ‘No, she doesn’t want this’.” This, she suggested, absolves them of blame, but today any man who has been to college, where consent workshops are the norm, would have been taught “to get consent – but nobody said that then”.Now, don’t worry. I’m not about to tell you that Mary Gaitskill’s stories taught me how to live—or at least, not exactly. I mean, you wouldn’t actually want to live like any of the people in these stories, if you could help it. But like many young women, and many aspiring writers—young, female, and otherwise—I responded to Gaitskill’s stories instantly and intensely. I found them astonishing. I was seduced by the wildness of the characters, by their brazenness and force, even in the face of their own confusion, and often despite their inefficacy. I was interested and impressed, of course, by the amount and type of sex. Was this what adults were up to all this time? Dr. Fangelli put some good, solid pressure on her tooth. “Carla, could you pass me the other drill?” 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. It’s a remarkable moment. Quin recognizes Margot’s “no,” but Margot recognizes something in Quin—his desire, even his need to be restrained—and how, by denying his overt request, she formed a truer connection with him. Later, she remembers his expression when she stopped him from reaching up her skirt as “somehow grounded and more genuine than his reaching hand had been.” Their friendship is forged not despite but because of this brief moment of struggle, during which each reveals something to the other and recognizes something in turn. 26

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

My introduction to the fiction of Mary Gaitskill is Bad Behavior: Stories. Published in 1988, these nine darkly wondrous stories rebelliously refuse to conform; several involve abnormal sexual behavior, but not all. Several take place in Manhattan, but not all. Several are third person accounts, but not all. Several feature female protagonists, but not all. In spite of the eclecticism, I felt a thrill at discovering each entry, which felt like time capsules from the late 20th century, bottled with hang-ups and distractions that impeded happiness in a certain place or time. The image became tiny and unnaturally white, was surrounded by darkness, then faded like the picture on a turned off TV.

Gaitskill's favorite writers have changed over time, as she noted in a 2005 interview, [12] but one constant is the author Vladimir Nabokov, whose Lolita "will be on my ten favorites list until the end of my life." Another consistently named influence is Flannery O'Connor. Despite her well-known S/M themes, Gaitskill does not appear to consider the Marquis de Sade himself an influence, or at least not a literary one: "I don't think much of Sade as a writer, although I enjoyed beating off to him as a child." [13] Bibliography [ edit ] 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.” That knife-edge turn of perspective! That matter-of-fact dismembering! It’s so good. It’s so deft. I love it. Not to mention all of the work that the single line of the female character’s imagination is doing. Not a word is wasted here. The stories are frank, engaging, often unresolved glimpses of tough experience, especially for the young female artist. All the characters are struggling in their own way to find connection, whether romantic or friendship or sexual. Their interior lives are richly portrayed. We are taken right into the intricacy of their thought and feeling with brazen honesty.

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

Oh, I don't know; I just found the whole thing annoying. It was also a finalist for the National Book Prize, clearly I am a grumpy growing-older-man with no patience for this stylish claptrap. Maybe it was a bad idea to read this during Thanksgiving weekend. The extraordinary new novel from the acclaimed author of Bad Behavior and Two Girls, Fat and Thin, Veronica is about flesh and spirit, vanity, mortality, and mortal affection. Set mostly in Paris and Manhattan in the desperately glittering 1980s, it has the timeless depth and moral power of a fairy tale.Daisy's Valentine follows Joey, a clerk at "a filthy secondhand bookstore on the Lower East Side of Manhattan" who sets out to woo Daisy, a typist he's worked with for a year. Beloved by staff and customers alike, Daisy has widely discussed her romantic difficulties, unable to force her pitiful live-in boyfriend to break up with her. Joey's routine with his girlfriend of eight years Diane is just that: routine. The couple stays high on Dexedrine three and a half days a week and Diane can tell there's another woman before there is another woman. Joey spends days designing a special Valentine's Day card for Daisy, handing it to her a week after the holiday. I found this book so powerful that I couldn't write about it right away. I've had an ambivalent relationship to other work by Gaitskill (I'd only read her stories, not her other novel). I'm fascinated by it but sometimes repelled. The people and the situations often seemed ugly to the point that I wondered if an unconscious sadism wasn't at work. Then I'd wonder if that was only my squeamishness speaking. I also sometimes had trouble picturing her characters, who can be so contradictory that they don't even seem to cohere. Yet the writer's willingness to take on difficult subjects and difficult characters, and her strong prose, kept me interested in her work.