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[...] 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 shifts in consciousness so minute that they approach abstraction.
[...] “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 into another person who was very different from me. I was pretty young when I wrote that story, and he’s an old guy in an unsatisfying marriage.
I’ve sometimes had my students try an exercise where they narrate an episode from their life in which they felt mistreated by someone, or had a conflict with them, from the perspective of that other person. You pick something that happened a while ago, at least a year, ideally, because your emotions won’t be as hot. It’s remarkable how many of them really can’t do it. They’re still portraying the other person as an asshole. It’s hard to sincerely occupy feelings that are fully oppositional to yours—to be able to look at yourself from that other position and think, What a twit!
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 too hapless, and it was all too depressing. I think part of it was that some of the stories were a little whimsical by themselves. I can see somebody feeling that, say, “Daisy’s Valentine”—which I happen to really like—is a little wispy. It just wanders off at the end.
good to know :)
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.
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 blocks of time. I tend to think of the period in which I was writing Bad Behavior as being really long, and it was probably six years altogether, but I actually wrote a lot of the strongest stories between the ages of thirty and thirty-two—“Romantic Weekend,” “Secretary,” “Heaven,” and “Trying to Be.” I started Two Girls, Fat and Thin during that period, too, although I didn’t get that far into it then. I didn’t really have a writing routine—I’ve never had one—but it was easier to get work done when I didn’t have to wait until eleven at night.
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, everything was still. I’d moved there because I didn’t want to be in New York anymore. After I published Bad Behavior, I’d had a parasite, giardia, for a year without knowing it, and had lost a tremendous amount of weight. I was feeling very unwell physically, and also confused about my place in the world. I had wanted so badly to be published, I had wanted the media attention I’d gotten, I had wanted people to read my work, but internally, I didn’t know how to handle it. I didn’t know how to behave at parties—everyone seemed to expect me to be so sharp and sophisticated, and I was not. Before that, I’d gone out mostly by myself and had dated sometimes, but it never really worked out. I hadn’t had much of a social world—I was on the outskirts of different scenes, with friends here and there but no real group. Suddenly people started seeing me as some cosmopolitan creature of downtown New York, but I wasn’t really.
No, mostly because I have no idea how to do that. And I’m not a very money-minded person—I didn’t know how to manage my finances at all when I started. At some point in the nineties Mike Tyson went bankrupt and all these assholes were screaming about what a profligate moron he was, and I remember thinking that they didn’t know what they were talking about. Tyson probably had had no instruction on how to deal with money, except maybe some from Cus D’Amato, and he had way more cash dumped on him than I did. If you’re not used to it, it’s unreal to you. My advance for Bad Behavior was five thousand dollars, and at the time I thought that was a lot—I wasn’t planning to quit my job, but I thought it was cool that I could pay off my student loans. Then the paperback sale was seventy-five thousand, and there were foreign sales as well—I thought I’d made it, and I didn’t understand how quickly that money would go. I started using credit cards, and by the time I was thirty-six, I was fifty thousand dollars in debt. I didn’t get totally out of debt until just a few years ago.
I supported myself by teaching and, for a while, by writing magazine articles, because in the nineties places like Elle, Mirabella, and Vogue liked to hire fiction writers. People would ask me why I’d written something silly like “On Choosing Not to Dye Your Hair,” and I’d say, “They pay two dollars a word.” A lot of the things I’ve written have been because I needed the money. The one thing I said no to was when The New York Times Magazine asked me to write an article for their fashion issue about getting dressed for a party. They wanted me to assess my figure coldly and critically, analyzing the pros and cons of each part of my body and how it looked in different clothes. I said, “Are you kidding me? You don’t think women have enough problems? Whose idea was this? I’d be happy to come over to his house”—and it was a he—“and coldly assess his body part by part.” I checked later on to see if they’d found anybody to do this, and saw that instead they’d had a man—my former boyfriend, in fact—write about a beautiful suit his girlfriend had bought him. Anyway, that was the only time I ever said, I don’t care if I need the money—I’m not doing that.
lol
I lived from apartment to apartment, sometimes with friends, sometimes strangers. I got a ride to San Francisco and stayed in a European-style hostel, where you could stay a limited number of nights for a fixed fee. It was a large dilapidated building with high ceilings and sweet, moldy drains. The kitchen cabinets were full of stale cereal, the kind with frosting or colored sweet bits made to look like animals or stars. You had to chip in for food staples. You weren’t supposed to bring in drugs; people did, but they were moderate and they shared. The man who ran it, a college student with a soft stomach and a big ball of hair on his head, even kept a record player in one of the common rooms, and we gathered there at night to share pot and listen to playful elfin songs about freedom and love. These songs had the light beauty of a summer night full of wonderful smells and fireflies. They also had a feeling of sickness hidden in them, but we didn’t hear that then.
just a nice snapshot of an era
down between open knees. Guys would talk loudly to one another about whatever they were thinking about or things that they did. I remember a guy talking about a girl he’d gotten pregnant. He’d told her to get on the ground and eat dirt first, and she did. “And then I fertilized it!” he said. The guys laughed, and the girls watched with intent, quiet eyes. I went out on the fire escape with Lilet and we sat with our legs dangling down, somebody’s lilac bushes between our feet.
I saw music, too, in the people I got stoned with in the park or saw dancing at parties or bars. I remember this boy and girl I saw dancing at a crash pad once. They didn’t touch or act sexy, but they looked at each other the whole time, like they were connected through their eyes. They didn’t pay any attention to the rhythm of the music. They danced to its secret personality—clownish and gross, like something big and dumb stuck in a tar pit and trying to walk its way out with brute force. Like being stuck and gross was something great.