Bad Behavior: Stories

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Gaitskill wrote the stories that make up Bad Behavior over five years in the 1980s, after her graduation from the University of Michigan, where she studied journalism and writing, and her move to New York City. In her last year at Michigan, she won the Avery Hopwood Award for writing. It was usually a predictor of literary success, but Gaitskill found it more a harbinger of frustrated promise. Unable to sell any of her stories to magazines, she worked various clerical jobs, including one at the Strand Bookstore. These day jobs gave her material; she offered sharp accounts of the anomie and ennui that can come from doing office work. They also gave her models for some of her characters, many of whom work in offices. 10 Dr. Fangelli put some good, solid pressure on her tooth. “Carla, could you pass me the other drill?”

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

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.God, how I love the story "Heaven" in Mary Gaitskill's collection Bad Behavior. I re-read it last night, twice, about five years after first discovery. Re-reading some favorite short stories lately, it's been funny to realize the gaps between how I remember them and how they really are. I recalled "Heaven" as a short story that mostly describes a middle-aged mom at a barbecue, sitting in a plastic chair with meat- and food-juices dripping down her face, remembering the lives of her grown-up children, which have in certain ways been disastrous, and yet feeling very powerful and satisfied with herself. The story is typical of Gaitskill in that it explores a familiar, even clichéd situation, only to subvert our expectations. The story is not one of justice served, nor is it one of justice miscarried. Instead, it is a story about how loneliness can deform a person, even one who seems to have so much going for him. The story doesn’t excuse Quin’s behavior, but in recognizing his flaws, it doesn’t outright condemn it, either. Instead, it asks us to see Quin for who he is—eager, erring, lonely, a creep and a bad guy who probably deserves to lose his job but not his humanity—and it also asks us to try to recognize what we might share with him, what might cause us to behave badly. If this story of sexual misconduct refuses easy resolutions, it also offers something more sustaining: a recognition of the loneliness plaguing each of us and a suggestion for how the damaged among us might possibly be redeemed. 5 I cannot agree with the charge that Gaitskill is a bad writer, however (as suggested by a certain reader from Nottingham: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...). Not that the particular passage Paul singles out isn't bad; I just don't think that it's representative. Even in the stories that I didn't particularly like, Gaitskill's writing seemed quite impressive. (This worries me a bit, because Paul is usually right on the mark. Just not in this case). The image became tiny and unnaturally white, was surrounded by darkness, then faded like the picture on a turned off TV.

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

Article ("Mary, Mary, Less Contrary" by Emily Nussbaum) in New York Magazine (November 14, 2005 issue). 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. 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. 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.

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Yager, Carri Anne. "Mary Gaitskill: Critics line up to praise her work- and don't have a clue". College Crier. Archived from the original on 2007-10-09. The novel The Mare, published in 2015, is written from the perspectives of several different characters. The primary characters are named Ginger and Velvet (short for Velveteen). Ginger is a middle-aged woman who meets Velvet, a young adolescent, through The Fresh Air Fund. Other characters whose perspectives are featured include Paul (Ginger's husband), Silvia (Velvet's mother), Dante (Velvet's younger brother), and Beverly (a horse trainer). [11]

Bad Behavior - Penguin Books UK

The March 2006 Harper's had a notable review of Veronica by Wyatt Mason that also covered Gaitskill's earlier work. 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.

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. 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. Gaitskill's fiction is typically about female characters dealing with their own inner conflicts, and her subject matter matter-of-factly includes many "taboo" subjects such as prostitution, addiction, and sado-masochism. Gaitskill says that she had worked as a stripper and call girl. She showed similar candor in an essay about being raped, "On Not Being a Victim," for Harper's.

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

Wonderful and infectiously off-kilter collection of clearly hugely influential stories, 'Other Factors' a particularly impressive example of Gaitskill's often uncanny ability to meld viciously skewering with emotionally affecting.

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It's a kind of inward aggression. It seems like self-contempt, but it's really an inverted contempt for everything. That's what I was trying to describe in her. I would say it had to do with her childhood, not because she was sexually abused, but because the world that she was presented with was so inadequate in terms of giving her a full-spirited sense of herself. That inadequacy can make you implode with a lot of disgust. It can become the gestalt of who you are. So the masochism is like "I'm going to make myself into a debased object because that is what I think of you. This is what I think of your love. I don't want your love. Your love is shit. Your love is nothing. [9] And she has this way of saying things in an unconventional way, but makes perfect sense to me. Like this: Through four books over eighteen years, Mary Gaitskill has been formulating her fiction around the immutable question of how we manage to live in a seemingly inscrutable world. In the past, she has described, with clarity and vision, the places in life where we sometimes get painfully caught. Until Veronica, however, she had never ventured to show fully how life could also be made a place where, despite all, we find meaningful release. She lay in the chair like a starfish and imagined the sound of his voice, the clink of the instruments and the squeak of chairs penetrating her body with thin rays of light, piercing through her bones and traveling gaily up and down her skeleton. She imagined the very life force of the universe, in all its horrific complexity, penetrating her every pore, charging her body with millions of tiny beams. She sighed and inhaled deeply; she loved nitrous oxide. 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.