Sam Leith Sam Leith

‘People confuse sadness with darkness’: the complicated world of Mary Gaitskill

Photo by Marion Ettlinger/Corbis via Getty Images

In the early 1990s, the American novelist Mary Gaitskill suffered an abrupt awakening. ‘I lived in New York, I didn’t have a television, I didn’t listen to the radio. I didn’t even read magazines or newspapers very often. I was really too preoccupied with my own existence, which was hand to mouth a lot of the time,’ she says. ‘But when I was a little better off, I began to pay attention. I did get a TV. I did listen to the news a lot. And I was just like, holy shit. What a weird fucking world.’

What particularly astonished her, she says, is how central the fashion industry had become: ‘Models had always been glamorous figures, but it was suddenly they were the most important thing any woman could possibly aspire to be. They were just the most important female figure in the world. And it was kind of ridiculous.’

The culture was telling her that ‘we’ were like this; and then that ‘we’ were like that: that the world could be sorted into a shifting set of aspirational categories. In an essay prefacing her novel Veronica, set in the fashion world, Gaitskill calls it ‘the seed of deprivation hidden in a fever-dream of perfection’. It’s characteristic of her that Gaitskill responded to that with a fierce sense not only of how ridiculous those images were, but how seductive.

Gaitskill’s latest venture is the publication in book form of her essay Lost Cat. For those familiar with Gaitskill’s work, it may seem to cover unexpected terrain. The story collection that made her name, Bad Behaviour, drew in part on her own experiences as a teenage run-away and sometime stripper — and was set in a Manhattan demimonde of bad sex and marginal lives, drug addiction and emotional trauma. (‘The Secretary’, a superbly unsettling story about not-quite-consensual sadomasochism, was given what Gaitskill called the Pretty Woman treatment when it was filmed with James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal.)

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in