Soohang Lee
Mary Gaitskill
Issue #39
We take afternoon tea with the literary great to discuss “old” New York, clubbing at Arena, and her latest story collection, Don’t Cry
By Adrienne Urbanski
Published: March 1st, 2009 | 3:39pm
Mary Gaitskill is, much like her characters, both warm and distant, friendly but guarded. Like the female characters in her short stories “Secretary” or “The Dentist,” she seems like a woman who lives at a distance from the world, even while letting in affection. When she picks me up at the Metro-North station in her adopted town of Red Hook, New York, she’s all bright blue eyes and platinum blonde hair. Her graceful frame and careful posture give her the glamorous air of a 1950s starlet.
It’s surprising to see that the writer, best known for depicting the flash and depravity of downtown New York of the ’80s and ’90s, now lives in a small, tranquil home filled with exposed wood beams, furry cats, and bright eye-catching paintings. Over honey-laced tea and apple cake, we shoo away advances from hungry cats as she commiserates about her past and her latest writing.
You’ve heard of Gaitskill’s works: the 1988 debut story collection Bad Behavior, which included the S&M-themed story “Secretary,” later made into a film starring Maggie Gyllenhaal. Then there was Veronica, a National Book Award-nominated novel about an aging model’s reminiscences of a friend who died of AIDS. Through it all, Gaitskill’s writing is known for her cold, masterful explorations of love and sex, masochism and sadism.
These days, she shares a seemingly quiet domestic life with writer Peter Trachtenberg, who she married in 2001. “I always thought I would find a life partner,” she says. “I just didn’t think that it would take so long. I got to be 41, and thought, ‘Okay, maybe this won’t happen.’ But then it did.”
Since her move upstate, Gaitskill hasn’t missed much in the gentrified Manhattan of today. “I haven’t been to a night club in a while,” she says. It’s a far cry from her previous life in the city during the ’80s, when she made friends with a promoter for Arena, allowing her regular access into the now-famous club. But then again, that was another era. “It seems like it was just a lot more fun back then,” she says. “People really put a lot of creativity in the way that they dressed. Now from what I’ve seen, you either have just lots of wealthy people or poor people trying to look like wealthy people.”
Gaitskill’s new collection of short stories, Don’t Cry, seems to reflect the changes in Gaitskill’s life. Less focused on sexuality, the collection shows an increased concern for current events. Inspired by a friend’s experience, the title story follows a woman mourning her husband’s death while traveling with her friend in the war zones of Ethiopia, on a mission to adopt a child. Another story, “The Arms and Legs of the Lake” explores multiple perspectives of soldiers returning from Iraq, and how those around them perceive the war.
While the majority of Gaitskill’s work has been told through the third person narrative of a single character, her stories now show a willingness to experiment; many are now written in the first person, sometimes integrating multiple perspectives into one story. In “The Agonized Face,” Gaitskill even writes herself into a story, as a character known as “the feminist writer.”
Gaitskill still visits New York these days, but she notes a visible difference in the attitudes of young career women today, who might as well have stepped out of an episode from “Sex and the City.”
“I just don’t remember women in their twenties being quite so fixed on what they wanted and having a checklist,” Gaitskill observes. “I have the impression that they do now, and to me that seems weird. I guess I came at a moment in time when women, or at least people I knew, really weren’t thinking that way. There was kind of a strong rejection of those kinds of materialistic ideas. But it seems like things have maybe turned back around.”
__________________
the where, what, and why
Hometown: “My family moved around a lot. I don’t really have a hometown. Originally though, I am from Northville, Michigan.”
Works published: Two story collections (Bad Behavior and Don’t Cry) and two novels (Veronica and Two Girls, Fat and Thin)
Favorite books as a kid:Magic by the Lake, A Wrinkle in Time, The Narnia series, The Tarzan series, The Hobbit, and Lord of The Rings
Least favorite word: Nude. “It does not, in my mind, improve on ‘naked’ at all, and has a coy, prudish, and pretentious sound.”
Sample line from Don’t Cry: “She should not have shown him her soul. She flashed it again and again, as if it were a bauble meant to entice him, or a hand mirror flashing signals from a dark and lonely place.” — From “Mirror Ball”
Comments
Want to tell us what you think? Please click here to log in or just click here for quick comments