Bad Behavior: Stories

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If you are going to write a whole book of short stories all starring the exact same depressed people having regrettable sex with each other and eating eggs at least put in some boobies. I'm glad I stumbled on this collection of short stories as they are my kind of stories. Set in a time and place that I idealise. However I feel they won't be everyone's cup of tea, as they often focus on dark areas such as prostitution, depression, suicide and sexual violence. That knife-edge turn of perspective! That matter-of-fact dismembering! It’s so good. It’s so deft. I love it. Not to mention all of the work that the single line of the female character’s imagination is doing. Not a word is wasted here.

Bad Behavior - Penguin Books UK

Masochist and submissive/slave are not the same thing. It was driving me bananas that she kept referring to them as if they were interchangeable terms.This is Mary Gaitskill’s first published work (1988) and is a set of nine short stories. The first four are from a male point of view, the last five from a female point of view. The themes are loneliness, destructive behaviour, sexuality, romance, love, drug addiction, sadomasochism, living in New York and aspirations to be a writer. The characters are often troubled, disillusioned or bored: teenage runaways, jaded sex workers, rootless businessmen. Discomfort and angst is pretty much a default setting and a great deal goes on beneath the surface. Inner conflicts are laid bare and the complexities and problems of human connection are analysed. Gaitskill writes from some of her experiences as a teenage runaway and she worked for a time as a stripper and a call girl. It is centrally about women’s inner conflicts and their response to men; whether lovers, husbands, clients, fathers and sons. There is an interesting tale about family life at the end which examines mother/daughter relationships. Women here seem to make better connections than men but there is always something just beneath the surface. The men are not cardboard cut-outs or stereotypes and there is nuance. Somehow the nuance makes the betrayals and the violence worse. With this book, Gaitskill explains, she wanted to approach the familiar narratives of the #MeToo movement – “the bigger story that has been splattered all over the media and social media” – from a more intimate, nuanced perspective: “The subject, the way I’ve told it, is a very private story, from the inside point of view,” she says. “[Having] two people was a way to contain it [and] there was a beauty in containment, because the thing about the bigger story … is that you see the currents, but you often don’t see people really feeling it.”

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That so many women in particular find it difficult to say “no”, Gaitskill said, is because “women are still brought up to feel they should please. Not just sexually, but generally.” In fact, she said, this is something she has observed professionally. In other interviews she has given, the interviewer often comments on the fact she doesn’t smile. “Even these women journalists, who I’m sure are feminists, are made uncomfortable when I don’t smile when they’re expecting me to. I don’t think they’d be like that with men. It’s an unconscious bias. I personally dislike forced smiles. I feel like I can sense them – and that makes me uncomfortable.” A young woman anxiously waits for her date on a street corner in New York City; he sits in a pizza parlour across the street, watching her discomfort.An Affair, Edited is about Joel, a film distribution executive in Manhattan who takes a different route to work one day and bumps into Sara, a lover he from the University of Michigan. Hyper-aware of his prospects, Joel has yet to find a woman to accommodate him. He casually dismissed Sarah years ago and appears likely to do the same again. Gaitskill tells me she understands the need driving Quin as “a need for love, [a] very strong need to have women look at him, smile at him, be dependent on him, want him for something, want him to touch them. I could be wrong, but I would interpret that as a need for love. Maybe there would be men [for whom] it would purely be a need for power, but not in the character I’ve created.” And after a pause: “I’m sure some people would think that is too soft.” Recognizing fragility can also lead to different and more meaningful victories—another theme that runs through her short stories and novels. In 1997’s “The Blanket,” one of the sweetest stories Gaitskill has written, a 36-year-old woman and a 24-year-old man confess their love and commit to their relationship, but they can do so only after they have both admitted to the depth of their fear: the woman by telling the man that a particular bit of sexual role-playing upset her, the man by telling the woman how scared he is of losing her. In her first novel, Two Girls Fat and Thin (1991), two lonely women, both molested as children, find a tenuous connection, but only after one of them, a journalist, has published an unflattering account of the other. The book’s final scene finds the two women sleeping in bed together, a platonic echo of the concluding scene in “The Blanket.” 14 The result might startle readers who know the original story best through its titillating and austere 2002 film adaptation, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader. Debby, the narrator of both stories, struggles to exorcise her feelings for the man who galvanized her sexuality and left her feeling exiled from ordinary tenderness and dignity. This isn’t the first such story Gaitskill has written in the aftermath of #MeToo. “ This Is Pleasure,” a novella published in 2019, describes an older woman’s friendship with a charming male publisher who stands accused of coming on to his female subordinates. Like all her fiction, it is thorny with complications. It’s a remarkable moment. Quin recognizes Margot’s “no,” but Margot recognizes something in Quin—his desire, even his need to be restrained—and how, by denying his overt request, she formed a truer connection with him. Later, she remembers his expression when she stopped him from reaching up her skirt as “somehow grounded and more genuine than his reaching hand had been.” Their friendship is forged not despite but because of this brief moment of struggle, during which each reveals something to the other and recognizes something in turn. 26