Activity

INTERVIEWER

What were you reading in the period when you started to write more seriously?

GAITSKILL

When I was out on my own and not going to school, a lot of junk—though some high-end junk, like Looking for Mr. Goodbar. I was living in Toronto then, so my attention was on Canadian writers…

INTERVIEWER

Did you sell any of the individual stories before the collection was published?

GAITSKILL

No. I sent them to every quarterly I could think of, and I would sometimes get five rejection letters in my mailbox at once. The main thing editors would write was that the characters were…

[...] “Something Nice” also definitely describes an experience I had, when I worked briefly as a prostitute, and that one was told entirely from the man’s point of view—an invented character with an invented life. That dynamic wasn’t as antagonistic, but it still took something to imagine myself in…

[...] her greatest virtues as a writer of fiction are old-fashioned: exquisitely constructed sentences, a capacious moral imagination and a depth of feeling for human frailty, a near-hallucinatory precision in describing physical phenomena as well as emotional states, interpersonal dynamics, and sh…

Via social media, she knew words and phrases like gaslighting, trauma-informed, disorganized attachment, kink-friendly, pinkwashing, and could use them all in a sentence.

She was drawing near to the end of her life, and couldn’t imagine living more than another ten years. In that time, sick as …