Mary Gaitskill: Critics line up to get her wrong
 
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BY Carri Anne Yager

I suspect this is why many people call Mary Gaitskill's fiction ‘dark'— a
word devoid enough of content to imply a desire not to go certain places.
What's really being avoided, I suspect, is the acknowledgement of the entire
package of selfhood, warts and all. There is an almost predictable point at which
even the most eloquent attempts to interpret her work seem to veer into the
suburbs of denial. Realism still demands the kind of closure we think is quaint in
Victorian novels. Even in her early short fiction, Bad Behavior, we see
external conflict saturated in characterization that does anything but simplify and
resolve. With her current novel, Veronica, we find the immense payoff that
comes with digesting the sometimes excruciating truths she unveils. We see
undiluted personhood in her characters. To encounter Mary Gaitskill's fiction with
the honesty it demands is like scratching a very bad itch.

CAY: Given what must have been frustrating interpretations of your work in
the past, have responses to your later books become more in-step with your
intentions?
MG: Any time you write a piece of fiction it will be interpreted in ways that
you don't intend. It's difficult, it's painful, but it's part of the turf.
I would never change my writing based on my advance projection of other
people's interpretations. Just thinking about it makes my head hurt. And no,
nothing has become more in-step with my intentions, which is probably good, even if
I do find it irritating. I've read reviews in the past, but in the case of
this book I haven't read many. I did read the first paragraph of the Janet Maslin
piece in the New York Times because where I teach at Syracuse they have a
showcase where they put up books by faculty and, because my book is just out,
they put up the review. So when I looked at it, I read the first paragraph. I
don't like to complain about it because I understand it's a good review. People
have told me it is, but she says it's really dark and terrifying and there's no
tenderness whatsoever--she also compares it to Burroughs and the director
David Cronenberg. That suggests to me that she doesn't know how to read, on top
of it being a really strange misreading. Another review which I unfortunately
did read was the one in Slate, the online magazine. It was a positive review,
but my God, She thinks it's all about people being punished for having sex.
CAY: Oh, Calvinism?
MG: Yeah, it was the one where she called me a Calvinist!
CAY: Yeah, I read that.
MG: I mean it is a good review in the sense that it's very respectful, and
she clearly had a very powerful reaction to it. But I just don't understand that
interpretation. It seems all projection on her part. The book is not about
people being punished for sex, it's not about being punished for anything in the
usual sense of the word, it's just about people experiencing what can happen
to one in life. I really liked that she referred to the image, the vision
Alison sees of cosmically chewing teeth eating everything, but if you were going
to put a denomination on those... I don't think the chewing teeth have a
denomination, but if you were to give them one, it would be more like Hindu. The
teeth are more like a glimpse of Kali, The Destroyer. Kali doesn't destroy to
punish, she destroys because that's her job. And she's necessary for the
Creator.

CAY: You have mentioned that you were driven to write because of a need to
communicate. How old were you when you started writing?
MG: This is kind of a cutesy story but it is true: When I was six and I first
learned how to write, I wrote a story. It was what I first thought of what to
do with this new skill, and then when I was a kid I wrote stories. I wasn't
serious about it, it was just like kids doing drawings. I think I started
writing stories in a serious way, with an idea that I wanted people to read them
when I was.. about eighteen. But I really had no skills at all. I had no idea
what I was doing. And I was very poorly read. When I was in high school and
junior high, and even elementary school, I read a lot and I often read above my
age level. But when I was a teenager, things changed, and I didn't read much. I
read, but it was stuff that you would buy in the grocery store check out
line--a best seller or something. Occasionally I would pick up a classic, but my
reading was really spotty and I had no idea what I was doing. And then I went
back to school and slowly figured out how to put basic skills together. So I'd
say I started learning seriously when I was about twenty-one.
CAY: What happened that made you develop your focus? I was just wondering if
you took a certain class in college that opened you up and made that
difference, so to speak, or was it something that you discovered on your own?
MG: Well, I think whether you take a class or not, it's always something you
discover on your own. The most helpful thing to me in school strangely enough
was that before I went to university, I went to a community college--I had not
graduated from high school so I could not have gone to a regular university.
Also, my father taught at this community college and part of the deal with his
contract was that his children could go there for free. My writing at that
point-- well, I had to be in the remedial program. Community college teachers
are not busy like university professors are and they're not being harried by
students trying to get their attention. Most of the students in the community
college were there taking vocational stuff. They took the Liberal Arts classes
because they had to. Or there were those like me who were planning to take the
Liberal Arts classes and transfer to a university. But they just weren't as
ambitious or as likely to try to get stuff out of the class as university
students are. So I approached this one teacher and told him, "I want to learn how to
be a writer" and he was just thrilled. Probably the stuff that I was doing
with him would seem really babyish to me now. But it was immensely helpful. It
was the first time anyone had told me that I was talented. He seemed like an
intelligent person and I don't doubt that he was. He took me seriously in a way
that I hadn't been taken seriously before, so that was incredible, especially
coming when it did. I was in a really uncertain time and it was a big thing
for me to go to the community college. To get that reaction from an authority
figure was really galvanizing.
CAY: I'm glad for that. We might not have your fiction if it hadn't.
MG: I would've found another way if it hadn't, but the way things were, that
was a very important connection for me. When I went to university, they didn't
have as much emphasis on creative writing as they have now. But I took a few
classes and I actually didn't like the workshops. They made me really
uncomfortable--though I did meet one teacher, who I did like. Have you heard of Gayle
Jones?
CAY: No.
MG: She wrote a couple of books in the 70's called Corregidora and Eva's Man
. Her most recent book is called The Healing. She was very amazing and
eccentric and one of the first people who made me feel I was in the presence of a
genuine writer. And she took me seriously too.. She was one of the only
African-American professors there. She was not an academic, and I think it was hard
for her to be in that environment. But when she told me she liked my story--and
she didn't dole out praise easily—I went home and put on music and danced.

CAY: In order to create such realistic fiction, you bring the reader to
places that are uncomfortable to face. Is it also hard for you to deeply
contemplate these darker aspects of life, or do you feel relieved confronting them?
MG: Most of the time I don't think about it in those terms. But this relates
to your first question because what surprised me about the response to Bad
Behavior- it still does in the case of that book- is that it didn't seem to me
that my subject matter was especially dark. It seemed to me that I was just
writing about things that people deal with pretty regularly. I mean, not everybody
has a boss that spanks them for typing mistakes, but many people have
experienced the cruelty of office politics and the weird feeling of being sexually
attracted to something that's humiliating and not knowing what to do about it. I
think a lot of people have had that one way or another. It didn't seem to me
that I was writing about things that were that strange, so I was surprised. It
seemed to me, and it does still seem to me, that the book overall has a
gentle tone. It doesn't seem to me to be hard or cold. There have been times that I
was writing about something dark, and it was hard for me; certain sections of
Two Girls Fat and Thin, and this last book, Veronica. I actually had a
nightmare about Veronica, which I didn't realize was about the book at first. It was
when I was finishing the manuscript. I don't think it was only about Veronica
—when you have dreams, your unconscious often blends things together strangely
but- do you know the Black Dahlia murder?
CAY: I've heard of it, yeah.
MG: It's a really horrible murder that took place in the 30s. I dreamed I was
digging up her body and reburying it. There was a literary critic present and
he was saying, "What are you doing? Don't you know this is illegal? Don't you
know you could get in trouble for this?" And I said, "I know, but I have to
do it. You should just get out of here. It's something I have to do." I woke up
very frightened and disturbed. The reason I think it was about Veronica,
although there are other things too, is that it was a book I had originally
written in the 90's which I was literally digging up and doing again. But the dream
overall was frightening and I think there were things in the book that were
frightening--AIDS, death, abandonment, and self--estrangement. It's not that I
sat there and felt frightened when I was writing them but those are very heavy
things.

CAY: I have some experience with confronting things from my own past and
working them out with words. I find it hard not just to go there but once there, I
find it hard to come back to normal life and I wondered if that was a problem
for you.
MG: I'm glad to come back to normal life. I like to have normal life around
me, but it's hard to mix the two. I have to be very alone to do the wording. It
's kind of like I have to go to a place that doesn't mix with normal life.
But I'm glad to get back to normal life.
CAY: When you are in the state of mind that is necessary to create that
fiction do you alter the normal, scheduled events in your life in order to
accommodate the need to keep going?
MG: Yes.
CAY: That must be tough when you're teaching as well.
MG: Yeah, it is.
CAY: Many of your characters undergo experiences wherein they are victimized
or helplessly witnessing as someone else is victimized. One quality that adds
power to these scenes is that the situations are left unresolved. Why is it
important to leave them unresolved?
MG: I think in general it's better to leave a story open than slam it shut.
There might be some stories or situations in which it's nice to slam it shut,
but in general I like the open quality better. That's whether the story is
about a bad experience or not. One of the things I like about Chekhov's stories or
the stories of a Japanese writer, Haruki Murakami--their stories are often
open to the point that while they have unity and integrity you can't quite say
what it is. When writing is good it allows and honors the mysterious to be
present. It doesn't come up with too many answers. Because there aren't really
answers. I mean there may be answers temporarily in life but there are no answers
with a capital A--life is too strange for that and it changes too much for
that. I think stories should honor that and do honor that.
CAY: It's been said that your characters try to break out of lonely worlds by
seeking intimacy with strangers. Do you see your characters this way?
MG: That's true of some of the stories I've written. What's wrong with that
analyses is that it sounds like that's the character's entire motive, and most
of my characters aren't doing that. I don't know if I've even got any
character doing that consciously. The character in Two Girls Fat and Thin, Justine,
does get involved with a stranger and you could say that it's to have a feeling
of intensity that will alleviate loneliness, but she doesn't seek him out. She
just bumps into him and responds to him. The girl in “Secretary” is a lonely
person, but she doesn't seek out the situation with her boss, it's happened.
She responds to it. You could say she's using the experience to break out of
loneliness, or try to, but I think her motives are more complicated than that.
She's somebody with a need for intensity and doesn't know her own sexuality
well enough or understand the situation that well. I guess what I don't like
about the comment is that it's reductive, or only part true.

CAY: You create ambivalent characters. Do you feel it's important to subvert
the reader's identification process?
MG: I don't think of it that way. I feel that in life I am often surprised by
people. I think of them as one way and they turn out to be another. And then
sometimes I come back around to my original idea of them.
CAY: There are parts of Veronica in which the narrator, Alison, may come off
as judgmental. Because of the power of Alison's voice as a narrator, do you
think readers might confuse her voice with your own?
MG: Perhaps, but I honestly don't think she's so bad considering where she's
come from and what she's experienced. I don't think she's a moral paragon
either, but I think the judgments she makes are very typical. I think they're the
kinds of things that go through people's heads. She seems morally average to
me. And in fact, for somebody her age, the fact that she stays friends with
Veronica and supports her as best she can is what redeems her as a person. But I
think that most people think the kind of things she thinks. They might not be
thoughts that you take seriously, but they run through your mind. Remember,
Alison judges herself very harshly for some of her unkind thoughts. And, she
thinks some very kind, generous thoughts as well. I don't think she ever thinks
that AIDS is there to punish people for having sex, it's more a fear. There's
a section where she's thinking, "We tried to be so liberal and they were
always about death" and so on and so forth but those are the kind of thoughts that
I believe everybody at that time had. AIDS at that time brought up really
deeply buried feelings about guilt and terror; about sex and feelings that people
thought were over, because for the last twenty years or so before AIDS reared
its head, for the first time in history, really, people thought they could
have sex without severe social or medical consequences. It seemed to change the
way people thought and felt about sex and yet when AIDS happened I think that
those deeper, darker, very primitive fears came roaring back in a big way. I
would guess a lot of people had those thoughts. Alison's not happy with those
thoughts either; she's really surprised and ashamed. To me Alison's worst
characteristic is that she's vain and she lets her life become about her beauty,
but I also think that for a beautiful girl with little connection to her family,
and who is searching for excitement, it's a very understandable flaw. If I
were sixteen and was told I could be a model I would probably be very sarcastic
about it and talk about how stupid and sexist it was but I would have done it-
who could say no to that kind of money. Especially a girl from a working
class family. When I read, I don't feel I need to identify with narrators or like
them. I can very much enjoy books narrated by or about people that I wouldn't
necessarily like or want to spend time with. In fact to me it's a plus to be
able to be inside the mind of a person and spend time with a person on a page
that I wouldn't in life. In life I could never get to that deep place inside
them that the writer can. So I'm not necessarily trying to get the reader to
identify with the characters. Some people do, but that's not a goal of mine.
CAY: And you're not especially trying to make the reader question the
narrator either?
MG: No, I'm trying to present the narrator as accurately as I can. When I was
in Alison I was always trying to feel my way around what Alison would think
and feel and respond to in a given moment. I was trying to be as accurate about
that as possible. I don't think about other people's reactions or getting
people to question things or like or dislike at the time that I'm writing. I'm
just trying to be as accurate and real as possible about the person I'm
describing or bringing to life. I feel that other people's reactions are none of my
business at that moment.

CAY: Pain and sex seem closely connected for your characters, and you have
said that sexuality and sadness have a natural connection. Do you believe they
exist close together deep within the human psyche, driving our actions?
MG: They can be, yes. I think that sex can also be connected with joy and
procreation and rage and fear and love and strange things that we can't even
identify really. Basically sex is connected with anything deep within people. Just
the act of procreation and coming into a physical being has a hint of death
to it because that physical being is going to die at some point. So, I think
that they're connected and it's a connection that gets overlooked sometimes or
that people find frightening.
CAY: Do you believe consensual sexual pain (as in S&M) and pain evoked by art
are both cathartic in a similar way?
MG: I don't know. I kind of doubt it. They may be cathartic but I don't think
in the same way. I think that anything you do physically with your body by
nature is very different from what you do in your mind or with art.
CAY: Do you think it's part of human nature to be aroused by things that we
cannot explain to ourselves or justify morally?
MG: Yes.
CAY: Do you think people need to experience injustice before they believe in
it?
MG: Yes and no. I think that people can understand in their minds that
injustice exists and be indignant about it but I don't think they really understand
it until they experience it themselves.
CAY: So maybe they understand it but in a faraway, abstract sort of way?
MG: In a relatively superficial way. It's a much deeper understanding when
you have experienced it.
CAY: Since we're on the subject, what do you think of the situation with
Hurricane Katrina as it pertains to that kind of social problem?
MG: Well, it's horrific. I don't know if I've got adequate words to describe
it. I think that people who are not in that situation can never understand
what it's like regardless of how you might understand it in your mind. This may
seem like a digression, but bear with me: I' m reminded of a reviewer who said
that Alison's feeling of hope or generosity in the end was false because the
whole book was so dark that her hope at the end couldn't be true. And it's true
that Alison's desire to be helpful- the image of herself as a bird giving
breadcrumbs to others- comes too late for her to be able to do anything practical
with it. There aren't that many people in her life she can help in a
practical way. She has no money, unlike Daphne who sends money to her sister. But to
me it counts that she's having that thought. And truly , anybody can help
people. After Katrina we heard a lot of stories of rape and violence which I'm
sure happened, but I think there were other things we didn't hear about. I'm
sure that there were people who had nothing and no ability to offer practical
help, but who offered warmth and kindness to their neighbors who were also
without houses, water and food and were just stranded somewhere. I'm sure that
people did things like put their arms around each other and comfort each other.
And that kind of help, even though it's of no practical use, can be as powerful
as knowing that somebody far away is going to be writing a check to supply
relief. I'm sure that the people in that situation were able to offer comfort to
each other in a way that couldn't be offered by people outside because people
outside didn't understand. To have someone who's going through what you're
going through, and knows exactly what it's like, put their arms around you and
hold you while you're crying is a much more powerful experience emotionally than
for someone to come in- even though you might very much appreciate the person
coming in to rescue you- they can't really understand what's happening on a
gut level, unless they've gone through it themselves. Though that's not totally
fair to the rescuers, they had their own hell to go through.
CAY: Injustice is a recurring theme in your writing. You have demonstrated
several situations in which people can't help what is happening to them. For
example, it seemed to me that Alison found Veronica's family shocking, and I
wonder if readers might also find it hard to imagine a family situation so
terrible. I can't help but wonder if people interact with literature differently
depending on their backgrounds. Do you think defense mechanisms play a role in a
reader's interpretation?
MG: Yeah. There's some quote from... I think there was one volume of stories
by Checkhov where he quotes someone and I don't know who it is, but it's about
how, "the man who is not suffering will do anything to avoid seeing the man
who is. And the man who is suffering, as soon as his sufferings are over, he
will also do anything to avoid seeing the man who is suffering." And I think
that's really true, even of people who are working with suffering people. There's
some suffering that does not have a solution, and that's something that
people just don't want to face. It's very human, but...
CAY: Do you think things have improved over the years for women, or do you
think the same old problems lurk beneath a different surface appearance?
MG: I think they've changed since the 20's or 30's in certain ways but I
think there will always be a power struggle between men and women. I don't mean
that in a dark, hideous way. I just think it's a clash between two fundamentally
different forces. Men and women are very, very different physically. I don't
mean they're from different planets. They are the same species and it's true
that the similarities are more than the differences. We all have arms, legs,
feet and heads (laughs) but nonetheless, it's like a cosmic opposition almost,
and this always will result in a clash.

CAY: Do you think people use judgments regarding "making right choices" as an
excuse to isolate people when they are most in need?
MG: Sometimes, yeah. But it's also true that you can't leave out the question
of choices altogether. People do make choices, and the complicated thing is
that when people make wrong choices or choices which are going to increase
their suffering -which people do constantly- usually there's some really
complicated thing going on in them wherein they either don't see another choice.. or...
I think that's mostly it. It's almost like they literally don't see another
choice. But also I think there's really complicated questions of…Did you ever
read a book called Random Family?
CAY: No.
MG: It's a very interesting book and very disheartening in many ways. It's
about a woman who spent a lot of time living with a very poor, extended Hispanic
family in the Bronx and she obviously liked them a great deal and they came
across as very likable people but you saw them constantly making unbelievably
bad choices. This one woman was on a waiting list to get on SSI, which would
have enabled her to get really cheap, decent housing and she at the last minute
just said "no." She went to live in an even worse place than she had before,
which was so bad she wound up moving out of it almost immediately. In the book
you felt that part of the reason that the people made those kinds of choices
was that they didn't want to abandon the other people who were in poverty. They
felt in some way that by getting something better, they were abandoning their
family, for example. A friend of mine said the same thing. She mentored a
Dominican girl in her neighborhood. At first the girl was improving in school, k
ind of wanting to do well in school and improve her chances in life and then
suddenly she just started fucking up everywhere, left and right. And my friend
couldn't really understand it, but what she thought was happening was that
the girl didn't want to abandon her family and her friends. And she felt like by
doing better, she would. That's just one example. I think there's lots of
internal reasons that people willfully make what look like really stupid choices
and not just poor people, either. It's hard because on one hand you can't just
say they couldn't do any better, I mean they did make the choice. But on the
other hand, unless you could be inside their mind, you don't know why they
made that choice.
CAY: It's hard to speculate on the outside...
MG: Yeah, it's a very difficult question. There's self-destruction, but. I
don't think anybody really understands what self-destruction is. It involves a
lot of things, and it's different things for different people. I have felt that
way about close friends of mine, I mean white people who came from
middle-class backgrounds.. I've gotten angry at them because they make certain bad
choices over and over again and there I am left watching this downward spiral. It's
extremely painful to watch. It seems like it was avoidable, and it's
difficult not to get angry at the person, so I guess I understand the impulse to
blame.
CAY: It struck me in the novel, and in life, that AIDS has tested human
character, pressing people between their judgments and their loved ones. Would you
agree?
MG: Yeah.
CAY: I thought you did a great job of developing Alison's character
throughout the novel, and demonstrating the way time changes our perspectives. Are you
optimistic that society can grow as Alison did?
MG: I don't know. Right now I'm not very optimistic about society, period, or
human kind, period. But I think at moments society does grow. There are
certain times when society does really reach a good moment, and does genuinely
progress, and things get better. It just always seems like it goes to shit again
quickly (laughs).
CAY: Do you see that happening with Hurricane Katrina?
MG: I see that happening with the whole government now. I think that's not an
anomaly. Was it Bill O'Reilly that got on the radio afterwards and said,
"Well, if you're poor, you'd just better take care of yourself and stop being poor
because, otherwise, you're going to die." I do think that's become more and
more an attitude, even though very few people would come out and say it. I
think it's very prevalent, and the shameful handling of Hurricane Katrina was one
of the more grotesque manifestations of it.
CAY: I'm curious to see how it's going to affect thinking. I wonder if it
will be a passing phase where people are taking an interest in the poor, or if it
will have a lasting effect.
MG: You mean you think there's a positive side to it?
CAY: I think it's interesting that this is making people think about
something they have wanted to stay in denial about. I wonder if it will last. I think
there's been a lot of media coverage on it, and it's starting to be discussed:
the American poor. I've noticed that media will cover issues that exist in
other countries but the way it's being presented, it looks as though our culture
is better and more advanced. I think we have a lot of the same problems that
we look at other countries and judge and criticize. I think that American
poverty is more controversial because .. referring back to something you had said
in your e-mail conversation with Rick Moody, it's disloyal to appear sad or
unpatriotic. I have found that if you stick your neck out for the poor, people
think you are unpatriotic or you don't support capitalism. Therefore you're not
to be trusted.
MG: The outpouring of charity towards the victims of the hurricane I think is
good, but the difficult issue to me is, people have always been capable of
generosity in the face of really horrendous material suffering like that. The
Bush people have always encouraged this idea of private charity, and private
giving as opposed to governmental giving. To me, that's the knotty issue: how
much is the government responsible for caring for citizens in that physical way?
That's why the thing happened. There wasn't any care about the infrastructure
of the levees and no systematic attempt to get people out of there. They were
told to get out but they had no means to get out. Why didn't they have means
to get out? Only the city, state and federal government could have provided
that. I think that on an individual level, American people can be very generous,
write checks and volunteer. I think the question is, "Is that enough?" or
"What responsibility does the government have for this?" The government
responsibility is being dismantled, and has been for some time. Now the disaster is
being presented as, or evidence that, the federal government obviously doesn't
work, so that's one more reason it should be dismantled.
CAY: I have seen more attention given to the subject of the American poor in
the media. It seems to me that more people are taking an interest in the
subject. I think there are people thinking for the first time about what it might
be like not to be able to get into a car and leave your home if something bad
were happening.
MG: I think it's true that even as Americans have become more and more poor
there's still a feeling that real poverty doesn't exist except for a tiny
minority. Most people, I've read, regardless of their income will define themselves
as middle class. If people are waking up to the truth, then that's good.
.