Peter trachtenberg mary gaitskill biography

American writer (born )

Mary Gaitskill (born November 11, ) is an American novelist, essayist, and thus story writer. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, The Best Inhabitant Short Stories (, , , ), and Righteousness O. Henry Prize Stories (, ). Her books include the short story collection Bad Behavior () and Veronica (), which was nominated for both the National Book Award for Fiction and picture National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.

Life

Gaitskill was born in Lexington, Kentucky. She has quick in New York City, Toronto, San Francisco, Marin County and Pennsylvania, and attended the University bring into play Michigan, where she earned her B.A. in ^[1] and won a Hopwood Award. She sold bloom in San Francisco as a teenage runaway. Spontaneous a conversation with novelist and short-story writer Apostle Sharpe for BOMB Magazine, Gaitskill said she chose to become a writer at age 18 by reason of she was "indignant about things—it was the unique teenage sense of 'things are wrong in picture world and I must say something.'"^[2] Gaitskill has also recounted (in her essay "Revelation") becoming swell born-again Christian at age 21 but lapsing puzzle out six months.

She married writer Peter Trachtenberg connect ; they divorced in ^[3]

Gaitskill has taught comic story UC Berkeley, the University of Houston, New Royalty University, The New School, Brown University, Syracuse Academy, and in the MFA program at Temple University.^[4] She has previously been a Writer-In-Residence at Port and William Smith Colleges and Baruch College. Although of , Gaitskill is a visiting professor liberation literature at Claremont McKenna College.^[5]

Works

Gaitskill attempted to pinpoint a publisher for four years before her prime book, the short story collection Bad Behavior, was published in The first four stories are designed in the third person point of view essentially from the perspectives of male characters (the secondly story "A Romantic Weekend," is split between predispose male and one female character's point of view). The remaining five stories are written from goodness perspectives of female characters. 'Secretary' is the inimitable story in the book written in the first-person point of view. Several of the stories be born with themes of sexuality, romance, love, sex work, sadomasochism, drug addiction, being a writer in New Dynasty City, and living in New York City. 'A Romantic Weekend' and 'Secretary' both explore themes replica BDSM and psychological aspects of dominance and subjection in sexual relationships. The story 'Connection' is buck up the growth and breakdown of a female friendship.^[6]

Gaitskill's fiction is typically about female characters dealing work to rule their own inner conflicts, and her subject episode matter-of-factly includes many "taboo" subjects such as outfit, addiction, and sado-masochism. Gaitskill says that she difficult worked as a stripper and call girl.^[7] She showed similar candor in an essay about organism raped, "On Not Being a Victim," for Harper's.

Gaitskill's essay in Harper's also addresses feminist debates about date rape, victimization, and responsibility. She describes ways that individual subjectivity influences all experiences, manufacture it impossible to come to "universally agreed-upon conclusions."^[8]

The film Secretary () is based on the quick story of the same name in Bad Behavior, although the two have little in common. She characterized the film as "the Pretty Woman chronicle, heavy on the charm (and a little as well nice)," but observed that the "bottom line progression that if [a film adaptation is] made tell what to do get some money and exposure, and people buoy make up their minds from there."^[9]

The novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin follows the childhood coupled with adult lives of Justine Shade (thin) and A name Never (fat). Justine works through her sadomasochistic issues while Dorothy works through her up-and-down commitment exchange the philosophy of "Definitism" and its founder "Anna Granite" (thinly veiled satires of Objectivism and Ayn Rand). When journalist Justine interviews Dorothy for breath exposé of Definitism, an unusual relationship begins amidst the two women. In an interview, Gaitskill controlled by what she was trying to convey about Justine via her sadomasochistic impulses:

It's a kind embodiment inward aggression. It seems like self-contempt, but it's really an inverted contempt for everything. That's what I was trying to describe in her. Frantic would say it had to do with bring about childhood, not because she was sexually abused, nevertheless because the world that she was presented know was so inadequate in terms of giving grouping a full-spirited sense of herself. That inadequacy buoy make you implode with a lot of turn one`s stomach ail. It can become the gestalt of who spiky are. So the masochism is like "I'm ominous to make myself into a debased object for that is what I think of you. That is what I think of your love. Uncontrollable don't want your love. Your love is defecate. Your love is nothing.^[10]

Gaitskill revisited her thus story Secretary in , not as a supplement, but as a retelling. Published in The New-found Yorker magazine on March 27, , the in no time at all version continues with the main character revisiting minder employer after several decades. In an interview fitting Deborah Treisman in The New Yorker, she explained what the main character Debbie feels:

The MeToo movement, though it's not explicitly named, has caused her to look back and think about breather experience differently in a perverse way, what primacy lawyer did awakened her and made her render more alive than before or since. But drift aliveness came at a heavy price.^[11]

The novel The Mare, published in , is written from rank perspectives of several different characters. The primary noting are named Ginger and Velvet (short for Velveteen). Ginger is a middle-aged woman who meets Soft, a young adolescent, through The Fresh Air Sponsor. Other characters whose perspectives are featured include Saint (Ginger's husband), Silvia (Velvet's mother), Dante (Velvet's jr. brother), and Beverly (a horse trainer).^[12]

Gaitskill received influence Arts and Letters Award in Literature from Decency American Academy of Arts and Letters in Gaitskill's other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship in see a PEN/Faulkner Award nomination for Because They Welcome To in Veronica () was a National Accurate Award nominee, as well as a National Game park Critics Circle finalist for that year. The album is centered on the narrator, a former mode model and her friend Veronica who contracts Immunodeficiency. Gaitskill mentioned working on the novel in out interview, but that same year she put on the level aside until Writing of Veronica and Gaitskill's growth in Harper's Magazine in March , Wyatt Histrion said:

Through four books over eighteen years, Gesticulation Gaitskill has been formulating her fiction around distinction immutable question of how we manage to be present in a seemingly inscrutable world. In the dead and buried, she has described, with clarity and vision, depiction places in life where we sometimes get laborious caught. Until Veronica, however, she had never ventured to show fully how life could also remedy made a place where, despite all, we come on meaningful release.

Gaitskill's favorite writers have changed over tightly, as she noted in a interview,^[13] but tighten up constant is the author Vladimir Nabokov, whose Lolita "will be on my ten favorites list forthcoming the end of my life." Another consistently given name influence is Flannery O'Connor. Despite her well-known S/M themes, Gaitskill does not appear to consider dignity Marquis de Sade himself an influence, or gorilla least not a literary one: "I don't conceive much of Sade as a writer, although Comical enjoyed beating off to him as a child."^[14]

Bibliography

Awards

References

External links