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I also drew a lot of inspiration for Veronica from the place where I was living, a very isolated area in Marin County, and from a canyon I used to walk in out there, which was so fecund and alive—you felt a living, humorous, playful intelligence in extraordinary motion even though, to the human eye…

INTERVIEWER

Did you keep working all these different jobs right up until you finished the collection?

GAITSKILL

Yes—I didn’t quit working until I’d sold the paperback rights. I eventually became a freelance proofreader, which paid much better than the Strand, so I had more uninterrupted b…

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…