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—Leonard Cohen, Margaret Atwood. I also had a thing for D. H. Lawrence, whose writing seemed more passionate and more raw than most of the stuff I was reading—although even as a kid I could see the comedy in the Sturm und Drang over sex. I liked Erica Jong’s first novel. And Tom Wolfe—I don’t mean the old guy, I mean The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Later, I loved Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Joy Williams. I didn’t want to like Norman Mailer, but I secretly did. I could sense, although I didn’t have words for this at the time, something bigger underneath the misogyny—a willingness to go deep into what I’ve called, in an essay about him, “the lava of essential forces flowing beneath human life.” Plus, he wasn’t worried about offending people or being ugly or gross or anything—he was like an animal. I think I secretly figured he had to be that way, to get to the lava.