Bad Behaviour

by Mary Gaitskill

Powerful stories of dislocation, longing and desire which depict a disenchanted and rebellious urban fringe generation that is groping for human connection. (Or, more simply put, the angst of people-who-wear-black.)

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Erotica, Romance, Literary Fiction, Womens, Classics

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Mary Gaitskill is an American author of essays, short stories and novels. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories (1993 and 2006), and The O. Henry Prize Stories (1998). She married writer Peter Trachtenberg in 2001. As of 2005, she lived in New York City; Gaitskill has previously lived in Toronto, San Francisco, and Marin County, CA, as well as attending the University of Michigan where she earned her B.A. and won a Hopwood Award. Gaitskill has recounted (in her essay "Revelation") becoming a born-again Christian at age 21 but lapsing after six months.

Reviews

[Robin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've had Mary Gaitskill's novel The Mare on my shelf for a few years now. In my brain I had her filed under "Meh, she's a lady who writes about horses. Maybe I'll read her sometime." Turns out I had her all wrong.

Mary Gaitskill is edgy, unsentimental, dangerously sharp. In this collection she writes about people who are in the dregs - lonely and reaching out for connection. She writes about people having affairs, people into S&M, prostitutes (lots of those), drug users, struggling artists. She gives voice to those on the fringe, their desperation laced with extra darkness.

Her short stories sort of reminded me of Ottessa Moshfegh's Homesick for Another World. It's almost like she's trying to offend you, going out of her way to show you the dirty and dismal, putting you off with a raft of unlikable characters... but then out of nowhere, oh baby, a gorgeous thought or phrase. For example:

Miserably, she tried to gain a sense of proportion. She stared at the flowers. They were an agony of bright, organized beauty.

And she has this way of saying things in an unconventional way, but makes perfect sense to me. Like this:

My heavy oak desk was an idiot standing against a wall covered with beige plaster.

Who hasn't had an idiot of a desk? Oh, I wish I'd written this first.

Most of the stories take place in Manhattan, but in the context of rougher city life. No one in these pages is living it up on Park Avenue. I found it interesting to learn that Gaitskill worked as a stripper and call girl in her youth, because several stories feature prostitutes who are struggling writers. This woman knows of what she writes.

The stories are frank, engaging, often unresolved glimpses of tough experience, especially for the young female artist. All the characters are struggling in their own way to find connection, whether romantic or friendship or sexual. Their interior lives are richly portrayed. We are taken right into the intricacy of their thought and feeling with brazen honesty.

What struck me is these people, these struggling, lost 'nobodies' have such a rich inner life that one can't help but take them very seriously. Who cares about their questionable morals? I love Gaitskill's middle finger to the morality police, the happily-ever-after bullshit found in so many books I hope I never read. Ones about horses, maybe. Thank goodness this isn't one of them.

[Janice · Rating 1 out of 5]

So, lately I’ve been in a bit of an aggressive, combative mood... like I’ve been picking fights, or hoping that someone will instigate an argument so I can verbally “cut a bitch.” I’ve even gone so far as to go out in public* with the hope that someone will be rude to me, so I’ll have an excuse to lash out. I know I probably sound like a lunatic, and maybe I am. I probably need to be in Rageaholics Anonymous (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkQ9uy...) or at the very least, I should be sedated. Anyway, none of my usual victims have been willing to engage with me... so I sought refuge in a trashy book I suspected I probably wasn’t going to like. I hate it when I’m right. (OK, not really, but for once I wanted to be wrong.)

This book originally piqued my interest because of its purported similarity to the HBO TV show Girls, and also because Mary Gaitskill is scheduled to appear at a local college in a couple of weeks for a reading/book signing. For these reasons I decided to step outside of my admittedly narrow comfort zone, and give this a try.

So, what started out as a mild distaste with a pinch of schadenfruede eventually devolved into a full on hate-read. For the uninitiated, the hate-read, which is analogous to its more ubiquitous and slutty cousin, the hate-fuck, is an activity wherein one disseminates written content with the distinct objective of deriding it. (http://jezebel.com/5876891/the-art-of...) For me, this activity is normally limited to certain websites I peruse on the internet (e.g., xojane, jezebel, the NY Times style section, obscene chewing, the comments in Above the Law). Thus, I have never hate-read an actual book, until this one.

So let’s get to a substantive discussion of the stories, shall we? Gaitskill is perhaps best known for her short story Secretary, which is featured in this collection - and was made into a movie starring James Spader and Maggie Gyllenahaal. I don’t have anything to say about that story, because I didn’t actually read it. I got about half way through the collection, and couldn’t escape the feeling of déjà vu. I realized that the same two stories kept repeating themselves interchangeably. Dig it: depressive, college-educated, bohemian, aspiring writer, becomes a prostitute and her favorite client falls in love with her. Hilarity ensues. Then there’s its inverse: depressive, married, middle class, john falls in love with his favorite prostitute. Tragedy ensues. Then there’s also, the depressive, college-educated, bohemian, aspiring writer in an abusive relationship with a total prick, disguised as an S&M relationship. Humiliation ensues. You get the idea.

Even in those descriptions, I feel like I’m giving Gaitskill too much credit. The stories were dull, trite, and meaningless. And I feel like the elements of promiscuity, drugs, sex, S&M, were all included merely as a gimmick;** or to provide some shock value as a distraction from what amounts to truly bad writing. To wit:

“I love you,” said Sara.
“It’s not real,” he said. “It’s puppy love.”
“No. I love you.” She nuzzled his cheek with her nose and lips and her tenderness pierced him.
The image became tiny and unnaturally white, was surrounded by darkness, then faded like the picture on a turned off TV.
Come back.

I can’t emphasize enough how contrived the above referenced elements felt. I couldn’t escape the feeling that Gaitskill’s intention in adding the S&M, prostitution, etc. elements, was for attention,*** because few women writers were addressing these kinds of themes at the time (this was published in 1988). Twenty-four years later, these themes fail to raise an eyebrow, (although they did elicit many an eyeroll), leaving the stories feeling flat and meaningless. So I didn’t finish. Not even the shreds of gratification received from hate-reading could save this. These stories left me feeling empty and mean.




* a rarity for me -- I rarely leave the house willingly. I find the outside world too depressing.
** the entire time I was reading this, this song was in my head on a loop: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFRSaw...
*** and Gaitskill loves attention. Any woman that shows up to read an excerpt from one of her books, braless, is dying for attention. Not that I haven’t done that in the past. But the difference is I was 19 years old when I would pull those cheap stunts. OK... maybe 23. My point is, although some women may be susceptible to stooping to such vulgar bids for attention, most have the sense to grow out of it.

[Emily B · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

It like that there are a number of female protagonists and not just one sexuality portrayed. I also didn't realise that the film Secretary is based on a story that is part of this collection which was an interesting surprise.

[Paul Bryant · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mary Gaitskill is a bad writer. This is from page 176:


'Have I upset you?' asked Deana.
'No, no.' Connie looked up. 'I understand what you're saying,
but that wasn't the case with Alice. I never acted vulnerable
around her. And actually I don't really agree with you. I may
have done that to you because I responded to you sexually, but in general, I don't.'
Deana shrugged. 'Well, I only know what I've seen. I'm just
trying to come up with an answer for you because you seem so
distressed.' She stood and collected the dishes. Her fingers and hands, Constance thought, had an exposed, strangely cold and receptive quality, like the nose of a puppy. As she was watching her clear the table and take the dishes to the kitchen, she could see the many aspects of her lover come forward and shyly recede with each movement; her rigid, stubborn arms, her strong shoulders positioned in a soft, demure curve, her stern chin, her luminous forehead, her odd way of stiffly holding back and gently, curiously moving forward - all spoke of her radial gradations of tenderness, sorrow and radiant, fanlike intelligence.

*

It's awful. How do fingers and hands have an exposed, strangely cold and receptive quality? Or should that be plural? Is a puppy's nose receptive? Why are the arms stubborn? How can they be rigid if they're gathering dishes? "her strong shoulders positioned in a soft, demure curve" - it's so cack-handed and awkward. How do you hold back and move forward at the same time? Wouldn't you topple over forwards? Not so demure then, I think. And "radial gradations of tenderness" - could be talking about the fine qualities of a steak just purchased from the butcher. Or anything else. Enough. I thought MG's stories were going to be clever salacious fun but they're so blah - er, what's the posh word - affectless. If this book was a record it would be one of those Lou Reed albums he made in the 1980s which no one, not even his fans, listen to any more.

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

My introduction to the fiction of Mary Gaitskill is Bad Behavior: Stories. Published in 1988, these nine darkly wondrous stories rebelliously refuse to conform; several involve abnormal sexual behavior, but not all. Several take place in Manhattan, but not all. Several are third person accounts, but not all. Several feature female protagonists, but not all. In spite of the eclecticism, I felt a thrill at discovering each entry, which felt like time capsules from the late 20th century, bottled with hang-ups and distractions that impeded happiness in a certain place or time.

-- Daisy's Valentine follows Joey, a clerk at "a filthy secondhand bookstore on the Lower East Side of Manhattan" who sets out to woo Daisy, a typist he's worked with for a year. Beloved by staff and customers alike, Daisy has widely discussed her romantic difficulties, unable to force her pitiful live-in boyfriend to break up with her. Joey's routine with his girlfriend of eight years Diane is just that: routine. The couple stays high on Dexedrine three and a half days a week and Diane can tell there's another woman before there is another woman. Joey spends days designing a special Valentine's Day card for Daisy, handing it to her a week after the holiday.

-- A Romantic Weekend concerns a young woman named Beth who's recently met and become enamored with a married man. She agrees to spend a weekend with her paramour, flying with him from New York to Washington D.C., where he needs to retrieve a car belonging to his wife and drive it back. Spending the night in an empty apartment belonging to his grandmother, the weekend becomes a disaster. Beth is far too strong-willed and opinionated to function as the masochist she's billed herself as, while his dominant tendencies to insult or hurt her only seem to annoy and bore her. Neither understand why this should be so difficult.

He had met her at a party during the previous week. She immediately reminded him of a girl he had known years before, Sharon, a painfully serious girl with a pale, serious face whom he had tormented on and off for two years before leaving for his wife. Although it had gratified him enormously to leave her, he had missed hurting her for years, and had been self-consciously looking for another woman with a similarly fatal combination of pride, weakness and a foolish lust for something resembling passion. On meeting Beth, he was astonished at how much she looked, talked and moved like his former victim. She was delicately morbid in all her gestures, sensitive, arrogant, vulnerable to flattery. She veered between extravagant outbursts of opinion and sudden, uncertain halts, during which she seemed to look at him for approval. She was in love with the idea of intelligence, and she overestimated her own. Her sense of the world, though she presented it aggressively, could be, he sensed, snatched out from under her with little or not trouble. She said, "I hope you are a savage."

-- Something Nice follows "Fred," a veterinarian from Westchester who takes advantage of his wife's business trip to patronize a brothel in Manhattan that he likes. There, he employs the services of "Lisette," a prostitute he spends most of his hour talking to. He lies for no reason, telling the girl that he's a corporate lawyer, regretting it when he later learns that she's an animal lover. She finds Fred gentler and nicer than most of her clients and when he returns over the next two nights, she admits her real name is Jane. Her intelligence and manner appeals to him and he begins to fantasize about meeting her outside the brothel for a real date.

-- 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.

-- Connection finds Susan, a moderately successful TV magazine editor in Chicago, encountering a bag lady in Manhattan who reminds her of her college friend Leisha, who she lost contact with years ago.

They talked about leather gloves, high heels and their favorite writers. It was the first time that Susan had ever really heard Leisha's voice--the quick, low-pitched voice affected by a certain type of teenage sex star in the fifties and picked up again by bouffant-haired singers in the seventies, only in Leisha it had an intelligent edge that was not ironic but somehow plain and comforting, as if, honey, she'd been there and back, and she knew how important it was just to sit and have a drink and a good talk--which now seemed like a ridiculous affectation in a twenty-one-year-old college student. Susan realized that almost anything you talked about with this girl would seem important. And it appeared that Leisha was having a similar reaction to her. It was, as Leisha said later, the time they fell in love.

-- Trying To Be concerns Stephanie, a frustrated writer who supplements demeaning clerical jobs with work as a prostitute. She begins an odd relationship with one of her clients, a lawyer named Bernard, who under any other circumstance might be a man she'd date. To her surprise, she receives a job offer from an architectural journal hiring an editorial assistant, but finds that a conventional relationship with a man who pays her for sex may not work.

-- Secretary follows the exploits of Debby, who graduates from a secretarial class and with the help of her mother, finds work as the receptionist for a fussy lawyer who punishes typing errors by calling Debby into his office and spanking her.

-- Other Factors finds a literary magazine editor named Constance invited to a birthday by an old friend, dreading a reunion with a woman who rejected their friendship years ago.

-- Heaven concerns Virginia, a married woman in New Jersey grieving the death of her youngest son. The nest now empty and her surviving children grown, Virginia's memory is drawn back to the months her fifteen-year-old niece Lily moved in, the bond that developed between them and was broken. Virginia has to consider that from any other person's perspective, her life has been pretty good.

Lily's presence in Virginia's life began as a series of late-night phone calls and wild letters from Anne. The letters were full of triple exclamation points, crazy dashes or dots instead of periods, violently underlined words and huge swirling capital letters with tails fanning across several lines. "Lily is so withdrawn and depressed." "Lily is making some very strange friends." "Lily is hostile." "I think she may be taking drugs ..." "Think she needs help--George is resisting--may need recommendation of a counselor."

Virginia imagined the brat confronting her gentle sister. Another spoiled, pretty daughter who fancied herself a gypsy princess, barefooted, spangled with bright beads, breasts arrogantly unbound, cavalier in love. Like Magdalen.

"I want to marry Brian in a gypsy wedding," said Magdalen. "I want to have it on the ridge behind the house. Our friends will make a circle around us and chant. I'll be wearing a gown of raw silk with a light veil. And we'll have a feast."

"Does Brian want to marry you?" asked Virginia dryly.

The stories in Bad Behavior often hinge on This Is Your Life moments on the streets of New York--the only city in North America where you can conceivably run into someone you dated or went to college with--but Mary Gaitskill isn't so interested in how relationships can fill a person with something new, but what they can take away or leave in their wake. Her stories are filled with ghosts, deviant thoughts, personal humiliations, the monkey shaking the inner tree of her characters that refuses to shut up. As infrequently complete as most of these stories feel, I was exhilarated reading them, with Trying To Be my favorite.

Of course, she realized what he liked about her. He loved the idea of kooky, art girls who lived "bohemian" lives and broke all the rules. It was the kind of thing he regarded with a certain admiration, but did not want to do himself. He had probably had affairs with eccentric, unpredictable women in college, and then married the most stable, socially desirable woman he could find. This did not make her feel contempt or draw away from him. She liked this vicarious view of herself; it excited and reassured her. She wasn't a directionless girl adrift in a monstrous city, wandering from one confounding social situation to the next, having stupid affairs. She was a bohemian, experimenting. The idea made rock music start playing in her head. She kissed him with something resembling passion.

The city that draws those who dream of being published in The New Yorker or living important lives figures into Bad Behavior, but not every story takes place in New York and what I liked about this collection is how idiosyncratic each story was. Neither love stories or hate stories, they begin with the potential to be either. They took me into risky territory. Gaitskill doesn't provide neat lines and clear resolutions, but I was invigorated. An AFI student named Steven Shainberg was too and he directed Secretary as a wonderful low budget feature film in 2002. Instead of sadomasochism being portrayed as damaging, the screenplay by Erin Cressida Wilson proposes that the experience could be liberating. It's accessible and worth watching to see Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader act.

[el · Rating 4 out of 5]

me: yeah, uh, i'll take one white man without terrifying psychosexual dysfunction.
mary gaitskill, handing me another terrifying white man: is diet okay?

yes this collection was grotesque, yes this collection was dread-inducing, yes this collection sent me into a brief existential spiral over the bleakly imagined interiority of cis straight men (it felt too real...mary gaitskill, HOW were you able to tap into this?)—but was it thoughtfully crafted? yes. was the prose stunning? yes. did the unending impulse to describe necks/shoulders/bodies as erect/lively/alert begin to grate after the tenth time? also yes.

mary gaitskill, if you'd written and released this in 2024, i don't think i would have enjoyed it quite so much, but for you to have put out a collection focalizing awful white men terrorizing people—particularly at the intersection of women + sex—in the EIGHTIES? oh, this is subversive. this was saying what needed to be said at the time.

bad behavior is what emma cline thinks she's doing in all her work, but to wholesale center white men in your art, you have to be able to say something NEW or at the very least do so in a way that makes clear your command of language + narrative. if you can't do either of those things (and cline can't), you're simply replicating the vast over-saturation of a demographic already populating (and wreaking havoc) on our reality.

here, it's clear gaitskill is drilling down to the most unpleasant parts of the psyche, eroticism or a lack thereof, intergenerational trauma, passivity and power, and it all coalesces in a way that feels, if not conclusive, incisive. this is a woman who understands human beings and the ways they take to hierarchy. she knows why she's writing what she writes—you can just tell, even if her stories resist the impulse to become didactic.

there's a growing trend in contemporary fiction written in this vein, where writers trying valiantly to avoid didacticism or "PC allegories" in their work overcorrect by writing about (and giving unearned emotional weight to) shitty exploitative straight men, with no rhyme or reason. pick up a story by mary gaitskill and understand what it means to approach narrative with intention, to grow your characters because of and in spite of their horrifying actions—to ask why they hurt the people they hurt—and not simply because you want to be edgy or create "gritty hyperrealism" that is a perfect analogue for our current sociopolitical malaise.

reading this collection, i had the strangest sense that i was watching gaitskill play dolls in a dark and perverse dollhouse—but that she'd played out these plotlines with such frequency that she now knew how to perform each line perfectly. definitely a collection more writers need to read, particularly those who have an interest in the grotesqueries of the mundane.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.
Reading these is sometimes like watching a car crash in slow motion and Gaitskill doesn’t really do neat and tidy happy endings. One of the stories, Secretary, was turned into a Hollywood movie. The story here is much bleaker than the movie. Gaitskill does discomfort as a default setting, but the stories provoke thought and discussion.

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

While walking back from the laundrymat (because this is a thing New Yorkers do, we walk our laundry home after doing it (it being laundry, not "it", I'm not the sort of person who does base things like that). I don't know why I'm saying that, maybe just to feel like I could be part of the social-world (twenty some odd years too late, maybe, that these stories take place) I started thinking about writing a review for this book. The walk isn't very long so I didn't think much about it. I thought of a few things, and they seemed sort of worth saying but when I got home I decided to look at a review I wrote about three and half years ago for the other Mary Gaitskill collection I'd read, and I found that some of the very witty things I thought of saying I'd actually already said in less witty formats. You can read that review here.

In case you don't want to go read that review, I'll repeat myself a little bit. Reading these stories I got the idea that Mary Gaitskill would be the sort of person you'd be having coffee with and she would start to loudly talk about some kink in her sex life. Loud enough that anyone sitting within a couple of tables of her would have no choice but to notice that she just made an 'offhand' comment about how sometimes she likes to get smacked while getting fucked in the ass. I feel like she would then act all offended at the prudishness of the person sitting with her and the people sitting around her that were now giving her weird looks. It's not just that there is quite a bit of sex and kinks mentioned in her stories, but that it seems like it's mentioned too often as if to be provocative.

What is kind of funny though is that the one story where I don't remember there being any overt mention of sex, or a woman liking to get smacked around is the only story that I thought failed (which I now I just read through the blurbs and one of them said that this story was the best of the collection, oh well). This story, the last in the collection, is the only one where she moves out of her comfort zone of beautiful young-urban people struggling to make it in the creative world (no, this is a lie, "Secretary" doesn't deal with these people either, but I guess I just think of it that way since the movie was such a cult-thing) and deals with older people and family. This story feels too sentimental though (although another blurb tells me there is no sentimentality in the book) and populated with stock characters.

Gaitskill is a fine writer. The stories aren't unbearable to read, I just don't care that much for the subject matter or the characters. The stories here are more refreshing than say stories about sad twenty eight year old men who are slacking their way to be recognized as the geniuses they've been promised their whole lives that they really are, but being more appealing than that genre isn't necessarily that difficult.

I think one problem with her stories are the male characters are always so fucking lame. They don't feel real and they are either borderline socio-paths with what appears to be some sort of affective disorder or else they are just ridiculous. The main woman characters are much more believable, although they generally seem to be the same character with a few changes. I get the feeling that they are all Mary Gaitskill, which is of course the thing you're not supposed to think while reading stories (especially if you aren't reading a Mary Gaitskill story, then you might wonder why she would be in the story you are reading, especially if you were reading a story by a writer who died before she was even born, safe to say it's best not to think that any story you read is about Mary Gaitskill to avoid any confusion). If they are, she is very good at creating that character, but in this collection the other characters feel either flat or like wooden set-pieces.

As I said though, she's a fine writer. She just doesn't do much for me. If you like reading stories about strong women who also like to get smacked around from time to time this might appeal to you.

[Meike · Rating 3 out of 5]

I see how this collection about female sexuality and women who defy convention was goundbreaking 33 years ago. It's not that the topics don't matter anymore, but in a day and age where we have Ottessa Moshfegh, Melissa Broder, Virginie Despentes et al., these texts read like solid short stories crafted by a writer with a sharp eye and a real talent for emotional nuance, nothing more, nothing less. Gaitskill chooses a neutral narrative voice to talk about dominance, subjugation as well as the male and the female gaze, and the absence of moral judgement gives the stories a refreshing quality and renders them more challenging.

Unfortunately, I can't say that the stories really managed to captivate me - my mind often wandered elsewhere, I just didn't care enough about these characters and their trials and tribulations.

[Weinz · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading entirely too many phalocentric books recently I’ve decided to commence my “I am woman HEAR ME ROAR” summer and read only female writers for the next three months.

I’m on my sixth female writer and so far I’ve encountered “Why roar when the man will take credit for it anyway?”, “What’s the point of roaring when no one pays attention to me anyway?”, “I’d roar if the men would do something for me”, “Ro..., wait never mind.” and “All men want is open legs and closed mouths”. I’m still in need of my female empowering reading!! I’ve read great books written by great women but I still need that ROAR with out the neuroses that come with it.

I know many powerful women on this site can help me out. and a couple men secure in their own masculinity to admit they like a good female empowering non-chick lit read.

[casey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This feels like a predecessor to more recent short story collections I’ve read in the past few years like Homesick for Another World and Heartbreaker where you’re looking at loneliness, love and connection through a less conventional lens either due to the character or the circumstances they’ve found themselves in. Even the writing in this is quite barbed but I really liked it and I’d argue this book out of what I’ve experienced of the mico-genre,(if we’re calling it that), is it at its best. Personal favourites were A Romantic Weekend, Something Nice, Connection, Other Factors and Heaven.

[robyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

mary gaitskill walked so ottessa moshfegh could walk slightly slower

[Barry Pierce · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think, perhaps, I would have fallen for this collection more if it had not been recommended to me, at regular intervals, for years now. Bad Behaviour is the kind of book where if a person claims it to be one of their favourites I just know we'd get along like darlings. Sadly, at the moment, I cannot claim that myself. Which is a pity. Because I do know I love this collection. But just not yet.

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mostly these are stories about young women seeking to find expansion through creativity or sexuality. The themes are dark. Masochism, cruelty, power games, promiscuity all feature. There probably isn't a single decent male in the entire collection. Not that the females are much more likeable, but this is often shown as the consequence of all the male privilege and censorship they are forced to fight against. She's a brilliant writer.

[Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful and infectiously off-kilter collection of clearly hugely influential stories, 'Other Factors' a particularly impressive example of Gaitskill's often uncanny ability to meld viciously skewering with emotionally affecting.


“What about the nitrous?” she asked.

He backed off. “Oh, I forgot, you like that. I keep telling you it kills your brain cells, but if you want it—” He swiveled violently away. “Carla! Carla, get me some nitrous in here, will you?”

Carla, a dark, small-nosed girl with mascara-crusted eyelashes, entered pushing the familiar gray machine, and a cool rubber, none-too-clean mask was placed over Connie’s nose. “There we go,” said Dr. Fangelli. “Crank her up, Carla. We’ll let you get nice and relaxed. Carla, get the cream two-six base.”

Connie closed her eyes. A balloon of warm air slowly expanded in her head. She thought of the commercials for Wonder Bread that she’d seen as a kid, in which a lucky little boy was borne by friendly butterflies to Wonder Bread Land, a place full of flowers and clouds and loaves of bread.

“So, Connie, are you married yet?” asked Dr. Fangelli.

“No.”

“No? I’m surprised. How old are you?”

She lay in the chair like a starfish and imagined the sound of his voice, the clink of the instruments and the squeak of chairs penetrating her body with thin rays of light, piercing through her bones and traveling gaily up and down her skeleton. She imagined the very life force of the universe, in all its horrific complexity, penetrating her every pore, charging her body with millions of tiny beams. She sighed and inhaled deeply; she loved nitrous oxide.

“Okay, we’ve really got you flying now. Feel pretty good, doncha, Connie?”

Connie tried to surmount the saliva in her mouth and managed to make an affirmative noise. She could tell from the little oil slick on Dr. Fangelli’s voice that he enjoyed seeing his patients helpless and openmouthed in his chair, that it made him feel powerful, and in fact, at this moment he was sort of powerful. Well, that was all right. The universe needed spaces for power to move into. It liked those spaces and valued them.

“Just a little pinch … there we go.” He grabbed her lip and wriggled it. “You feel great, don’t you? I bet we could take all your teeth out today and that would be fine with you. But of course, we’re not going to do that.” He patted Connie’s shoulder. “It’s just a small job that won’t take a minute.”

The problem was, if you’re lying there like a starfish letting the universe seep through your pores, all kinds of stuff can get in. How do you keep out the bad things? “Don’t be such a Christian,” said Franklin. “Things aren’t good or bad; they just are.” Well, that was a whole other line of thought. She pictured it as a wriggly, purple organism entering her space, and brusquely pushed it away. She tried to imagine a selective gray force field coming down at the various points on her body where the bad things were trying to enter. She became confused. Franklin wasn’t altogether wrong. Buddhists and other people agreed with him. Anyway, even if you didn’t agree with him, how could you tell for sure which things were bad? The tiny rubber hose sucking the spit from her mouth felt bad to her, as did the sound of the drill. But they weren’t inherently bad, they were just dry and shrill. How did dryness and shrillness translate in terms of the universe? Surely these elements were affecting her nitrous oxide experience, but how?

Dr. Fangelli put some good, solid pressure on her tooth. “Carla, could you pass me the other drill?”

Then there were the basic things. She thought of Deana’s soft, slightly fleshy embrace, the pale skin, the severe mouth, the tilt-eyed, heavy-framed glasses and saw herself lunching with her friend Helen, in the area marked “social life.” Helen was talking about her boyfriend Patrick, who had strangled her a little bit the night before. “What I don’t want to hear is how I don’t deserve this,” said Helen. “Last year when George hit me I remember telling some girl who kept saying, ‘Helen, you deserve better than this,’ which is just such a stupid thing to say, I mean, what does it mean?” Connie tried to remember if she had been the person to say this to Helen; it sounded like something she might say. Maybe it was a stupid thing to say, but it seemed as though something should be said. Helen still had faint blue bruises in her neck. “I said to him afterwards, like, were you trying to hurt me or something just now?”

This image—Helen frozen in her gestures with utensils and cigarette—receded into another dark corner of her fluid mental field, so that other scenes could crowd the picture. There was Connie, sometimes with Deana, sometimes alone, at a nightclub where a man was saying to her, “With that hat on, you look like you’ve got a piece of the world in your pocketbook,” or at bars and parties, surrounded by well-dressed strangers who wielded their personalities like weapons and shields when they approached her, drinks in hand.

In confusion, she withdrew from all these things, which were, after all, only the substance of her life, and viewed them from a distance. Job, social life, relationship. Could these really be the things she did every day? What place was she in now, what was this distance from which they all looked so appalling? It felt like a blank space, silent and empty, so lonely that if she hadn’t remembered it was all nitrous oxide–induced, she might’ve cried.

She opened her eyes and looked at the stiff black hairs on Dr. Fangelli’s chin, and then at his placid, daydreaming gray eyes. Past them was the shiny, drab-colored machinery that was so forbidding to her but probably so familiar and homey to him. She shifted her gaze and met Carla’s kind, squirrel-bright brown eyes. Was Carla’s job in this office a set of symbols for her too, or was it an entity complete in itself, an efficient series of movements and interactions that emerged wholly and naturally from her needs and abilities like a bouquet of trick flowers, opening when you least expect it?

“Doing all right, aren’t you?” asked Carla.

Connie made a faint affirmative half moan.

Carla made a small sensual laugh in her throat. “She’s really enjoying herself now,” she said.

“And we’re allllmost done,” said Dr. Fangelli. “Just a little …” He did some dull, painful thing that caused a nasty taste in her mouth.

[Ben Loory · Rating 5 out of 5]

fuckin a

[Tiyas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bad behaviour. Sad human beings.

At its peak Gaitskill's now-iconic debut collection is a mishmash of erratic cruelty, poignant urban prose and a metallic tang, quite hard to swallow. At its worst, it just drags. Drags on and on in a bland loop of doom, trapped within the structural confines of trying too hard. The bookish equivalent of dry winter skin that welcomes scratches in all its grey, flaky ease. Be it sex, romance or simple friendship(s), everything gets skewered in the catacombs of youth.

Further props, however, to the author for her ability to leech off the muddy heart of metropolitan cities. New York, New Jersey, etc. Embellishing her stories with fatigue. All in an attempt to paint a greyscale portrait of heavy nothingness. It works to some degrees. Despite the odd, disjointed way of description that often rains all over her literal parade, she makes it out alive. And that's the least you can get out of this infamous bunch of stories.

Although I do pity anyone who picks this up for the smut. I know it's more of a recent social media trend. But there's none here. No stylised sex whatsoever. But sexuality as a weapon to hurt, manipulate and control, however? That's more in line with the pretension wrapped within. Although two of my favourites of the bunch, 'Connection' and 'Other Factors', both focus on disjointed female friendships and steer towards a completely different sort of intimacy. Something that (almost) made me think of a gloomier 'Frances Ha' at points.

Ahoy, sexy! 

No?

Okay, before I fuck off, here are three of my personal favourites from the nine presented in the collection. 'A Romantic Weekend', 'Connection' and 'Trying to Be'. (Sorry, 'Secretary'. There's already too many Pinterest souls rooting for you. You'll do just fine without me.)

(3.25/5 || 2025)

[Katherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

God, how I love the story "Heaven" in Mary Gaitskill's collection Bad Behavior. I re-read it last night, twice, about five years after first discovery. Re-reading some favorite short stories lately, it's been funny to realize the gaps between how I remember them and how they really are. I recalled "Heaven" as a short story that mostly describes a middle-aged mom at a barbecue, sitting in a plastic chair with meat- and food-juices dripping down her face, remembering the lives of her grown-up children, which have in certain ways been disastrous, and yet feeling very powerful and satisfied with herself.

There are a lot of barbecues in "Heaven," and there are plastic chairs and even some dripping juice. And the point-of-view character, Virginia, is a mom, in her fifties, of four grown children. And while I'm not sure if she ever displays the near-psychotic complacency I vaguely remembered from my first reading of the story, she is definitely not the sort of person who is given to neurotic self-doubt, either. Instead, she is a former popular girl who has always been tall and blond and good-looking. She's not a worrywart or someone who especially seems even to analyze situations. In short, she's kind of an unusual POV character for fiction, and I love that.

The story is more complicated than I remembered, too. It goes on for almost 30 pages, the time structure sloshes, and the narration mostly takes the form of snapshots, short chunks of text concerning particular memories that Virginia has of her life with her husband and children. But there's also this plot I'd forgotten, about Virginia's mousy sister Ann, and Ann's troubled teenage daughter.

So, Virginia was a beautiful and popular kid. While she doesn't seem to be especially vain about her own looks anymore (though she once puts on a pretty blouse, she often appears in sweatshirts, lumpy socks, etc), she married a big, handsome, alpha-male husband and had four kids, and she's super-vain about their looks. But calling it vanity seems cheapening, too. Virginia takes a deep and very relatable kind of satisfaction in her kids' beauty and grace, their physical existence in the world. This is a very sensuous story, as Virginia's mode of taking in the world is primarily sensuous and aesthetic: the vividness not just of bodies but of foods, rooms, clothes, natural objects, the everyday items of householding (cups, mugs, the bowl a certain snack was eaten out of), even something like the dirt and dust in the kitchen or the oily pans of water on the counter — is overwhelming. And wonderful. There's something in it very true about the way we remember our lives.

The action of the story rises and falls and rises again. All of the events that are related could easily be fleshed out into a novel, but there's something peculiarly moving about having them so compressed. Virginia's four children grow up, and there are detail-laden memories of each one. Each child becomes a well-drawn character, especially Magdalen, the feisty, beautiful, charismatic, difficult one, who leaves home at 17 and gets wrapped up in the grubby tail end of the '60s/'70s counterculture. But also Camille, Magdalen's high-achieving younger sister, and to a lesser extent, the two boys, one of whom Virginia claims is her favorite. There's also an extended visit from Virginia's teenage niece, who has just gotten out of a mental hospital, and whom her mother Ann says she can't handle anymore. The girl stays for some months; she and Virginia bond tenderly at times, but overall, her visit is a disaster. She gets into drugs, she's depressing, and ultimately she is shipped back unceremoniously to her parents. As a reader, you feel a moral question-mark here, but Virginia and her husband Jarold are unbothered.

The children's young-adult and adult lives bring crises and surprises: each time, Virginia feels confused, like she can scarcely believe what is happening to her beautiful family; sometimes she suffers, and inevitably the crisis passes. The weird, unbeautiful niece haunts the story like a bad dream. Largely I think that she, and her mother, are there as a foil, so you can understand what kind of a woman Virginia is and how she sees herself.

I won't spoil the end for you, except to note that there is a barbecue.

Why do I love this story so much? I love the ambiguous characters. Virginia is strong, satisfied, resilient; she's also prideful, inconsiderate, insulated. She's not one to apologize for herself—with all the good and bad implied by that trait. Characters who seem horrible at first become less so over time; characters you like at first have their horrible sides. This seems like life. I like being inside of Virginia's weird consciousness, and how much feeling the author can wring out of writing about a character who does not in fact feel every little bump in the road. I like how historical forces intrude, in the form of the drug underworld that claims both Magdalen and her cousin for a while, but are not named as such. I love the strong, defiant sense of life. (Even while, of necessity, the sweeping time-scale implies a slide toward death.) I guess that's it. Virginia has her ups and downs, but ultimately, she is a woman who cannot help but savor the world. Maybe my capsule memory of the story wasn't so far off, after all.

[Sasha · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book on a list of the ten sexiest books of all time, and I should have known as soon as I saw Tropic of Cancer that the author was confusing "sexy" with "containing sex", but this contains the story that spawned the movie "Secretary"! Which I don't know if you've seen that but it's sexy.

These are not, in any case, sexy stories. They're vignettes about relationships, set in sexy contexts. So the story about the lady who hooks on the side turns out to be more about one of her relationships than about hooking; same with the one about S&M. And "Secretary", by the way, is super different than the movie. It includes less sex.

So: it is not one of the ten sexiest books of all time. Not to say it's wholly unsexy; it's somewhat sexy sometimes. It's more sexy than if the contexts for the stories were, like, plumbers. Are the short stories good for themselves? Sure, yes, they're pretty good, although almost always frustratingly lacking in resolution. Vignettes, again. But I'm unlucky enough to be reading Alice Munro at the same time, which really isn't fair to anyone else; Munro makes everyone look bad.

This book is fine.

[Amy Gentry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finally got around to reading this, and you know what? It's worth the fuss. Mary Gaitskill is the fairy godmother of all women writing about bad millennial sex, and I only wish we didn't still need these stories 30 years later. Unlike the film adaptation of its best-known story, this is not a sex-positive book, but it's not prudish either, it's clinical and curious, dark and aggressively glum, and I loved it for picking at and peeling away the layers of skin around women and sex and agency and consent a full three decades years before Cat Person and so much more sophisticatedly than Normal People. No disrespect to Cat Person or Normal People, but they feel so weak and thin and conventional next to Bad Behavior's obsessively plumbed, almost experimentally naive metaphors for psychological states that only women ever seem to feel. I just love it, and I love that a generation often thought of as producing an annoyingly dudely canon also produced Mary Gaitskill, and this book.

[Ian Scuffling · Rating 2 out of 5]

A lot of realist writing, especially of short stories, in the '80s fell in to a trap of capturing small moments in economic prose, trusting that the economy of language and the quaintness of scene pack a wallop of emotion--a kind of Hemingway-ian philosophy, I think. Take for instance the closing moments of the ultimate story in Bad Behavior where Gaitskill paints the image of what's left of the family sitting down to dinner of steak and pasta, where the patriarch remarks that this is "just like heaven." The emotional weight of the series of tragedies of the characters' lives we've read in rapid succession is somehow supposed to be read culminated in this moment of "juices" running "into the salad," but it's an empty and useless metaphor--an anti-metaphor, really. This kind of anti-metaphor of the '80s realists, I think, is what makes most, if not all of these stories feel so empty and void of meaning, feeling, content and value.

Most times, these stories eschew character, plot, setting, metaphor, or really doing much deeper work of examination in psychology, theme, motif, etc. beyond these characters have fantasies/sexual deviant behaviors/make weird decisions. They don't internalize much. They don't seem to have motive. They don't consider other options, other characters, themselves. There's emptiness within, without, leaving the stories as kind of just as pointless relics.

The best story in here, "Secretary," feels incomplete, like a sketch for a great piece. But the internal/external conflict just doesn't match up because Gaitskill remains so detached from her subjects throughout the whole book. We stand so far removed from the characters, like people in a department store shaking a snowglobe. There are flights of fancy, and glimmers of prose that are worth lingering over (and others, perhaps, better left forgotten), but, overall, this volume of tales is fairly forgettable for all its tales of naughtiness.

[mina]

someone said that in this book, discomfort is the default setting and i have to agree. it's a weirdly calm book, very reflective in tone. despite the book's title, it's not as salacious as a read as i think a lot of people made it out to be, mostly because of how detached all the narrators seem to be about their own predicaments. the narrators also don't fully make their own realizations, instead the readers are tasked with doing that. not a bad thing, but all the stories have loose threads in the end. the characters also were a bit repetitive: many young, depressed, closed-off women. the narrator of my year of rest and relaxation would fit in perfectly. not to say that i didn't like bad behavior - it's complicated. it's not a strong book, but it shines in how it spotlights desire and alienation.

[MissBecka Gee · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wish the stories had been more developed. Since her descriptive writing is rather intoxicating it made the dialogue hiccups and lack of content more pronounced.

Large points of contention...
***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.
***I had read Secretary prior to this and had forgotten how different it is from the screen play. I prefer the movie myself. If you haven't seen it you should go check out Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader take this short story and turn it into something AMAZING!!!

Here are some of my favourite quotes from each story...

Daisy's Valentine
"The trees shivered through her voice, which quivered like sunlight."

"You're like a pretty shadow."

A Romantic Weekend
"She stared at the flowers. They were an agony of bright, organized beauty."

"She was delicately morbid in all her gestures..."

Something Nice
"The strangeness of it all delighted and fascinated him: the falsely gentle voice, the helpless contempt, the choosing of a bored, unknown girl sitting on her ankle, looking out the window."

An affair Edited
"The perfume of wealth graced her casually, like grass stains on the skin of a lazy child sleeping in a garden."

Connection
"It was vulgar, but there was a bravado to it..."

"The sun was evenly warm and pleasant and it seemed as though this was all anyone could expect out of life."

Trying to be
"Clawlike leaves smelling of ashes rasped and scuttled across the pavement..."

Secretary
"It felt like he could have put his hand through my rib cage, grabbed my heart, squeezed it a little to see how it felt, then let it go."

Other Factors
"The splintery floor looked craggy and forsaken with it's dead dustball vegetation."

"Connie paused and admired the graceful interaction of the three long sesame noodles lying on her plate."

Heaven
"When boys say I'm a prude, I say, You're absolutely right. I cultivate it."

"The face of her husband and children were abstract patterns taking on various shapes to symbolize various messages."

[W.D. Clarke · Rating 4 out of 5]

(3.5* rounded-up)

TLDR: As debut collections go, this is more of a grower than a banger, as the kidz all say these daze—for those just dipping their toe in, don't let the relative weakness of the first story dissuade or dishearten you: a few stories in, you will find much to celebrate, little to weary you, and more than one glimpse at future greatness. If I must quibble, perhaps there is a greater abundance of detail in some of these (at times, for their times) provocative (but never scurrilous), always rather artful (but generally-realistically-drawn) stories than I might have wished for, but so what?

That said, I did find the opener, "Daisy's Valentine" (a thingy about a unrepetant "recreational" pill-popper leaving his equally-addicted ball-and-chain for an office crush), a bit on the hollow side, though even there I found sentences that echo the perfection of some of Gaitskill's later stories, viz. "Maybe it would be better to hold her winglike shadow safe in the lock of his memory than to touch the breathing girl and lose her."

And as for her use of description, it often does precisely what it is supposed to: allusively suggest some thematic concerning the characters, and/or their context (or something), and again "Daisy's Valentine" delivers:

He found what he wanted in an old illustrated children’s book. It was a faded watercolor drawing of three red poppies sharing a field with pink clover and some blameless little weeds. A honey-colored bee with dreamily closed eyes was climbing a stalk. An aqua-green grasshopper was flying through a fuzzy, failing blue sky, its eyes blissfully shut, its hairy front legs dangling foolishly, its hind legs kicking, exultant, through the air. It was a distorted, feverish little drawing. The colors were all wrong. It made him think of paradise.

But for me the book really starts rolling with the next two pieces, "A Romantic Weekend", a two-POV-er that plumbs the deluded psyches of a banally evil serial sexual humiliator and his abject, bumbling would-be, erm, humilatee, there is much pathos (and some fun) to be had watching as Gaitskill, through a massive feat of imaginative empathy, gets us very close to their respective suns to singe our own wings.

Points in case (i) Him:

He realized what had been disturbing him about her. With other women whom he had been with in similar situations, he had experienced a relaxing sense of emptiness within them that had made it easy for him to get inside them and, once there, smear himself all over their innermost territory until it was no longer theirs but his. His wife did not have this empty quality, yet the gracious way in which she emptied herself for him made her submission, as far as it went, all the more poignant. This exasperating girl, on the other hand, contained a tangible somethingness that she not only refused to expunge, but that seemed to willfully expand itself so that he banged into it with every attempt to invade her. He didn’t mind the somethingness; he rather liked it, in fact, and had looked forward to seeing it demolished. But she refused to let him do it. Why had she told him she was a masochist?

(ii)Her:

In fact, she was shocked. Then she was humiliated, and not in the way she had planned. Her seductive puffball cloud deflated with a flaccid hiss, leaving two drunken, bad-tempered, incompetent, malodorous people blinking and uncomfortable on its remains. She stared at the ugly roses with their heads collapsed in a dead wilt and slowly saw what a jerk she’d been. Then she got mad. [...]How, she thought miserably, could she have mistaken this hostile moron for the dark, brooding hero who would crush her like an insect and then talk about life and art?

Now, as I might say of numerous other stories in this collection, I'm just not into that scene, man (like, at all, hahahahaha), but if I can dig it—and I guess I can, or did, it was only because Mary Gaitskill made me dig it, the way Dostoevsky made me dig the self-imposed torments of Raskolnikov, say, or Milton his sympathetic devil...

The next two stories, "Something Nice" and "An Affair, Edited" both plumb the emotional landscapes of sexual netherworlds still further—again, without so much as a trace (as far as my own Freudian Censor allowed me to detect) of gratuitousness.

In the first of these, Gaitskill wants us to think a little more clearly (or at least fully) about those old-chestnutty "Whores With a Heart of Gold" and their "Johns Who Fall For Them". For starters, though, divide that cliché by half, then halve that again, and then yet again, such that by the time we are at the quartic root of said formula, we become interested parties (hardly innocent bystanders but not-quite-guilty voyeurs, either...strangely implicated anthropological observers, perhaps?) as our author-handholder not only Virgils us through this somewhat less circle of Hell, but stops to ponder how complicated and bedizened and yet, well, non-binary and, still, even more delusory it really all is—even, or especially when it spurs a moment of self-recognition (in the characters, I mean, but ofc...):

And then he thought of a lumbering, middle-aged man in a suit, his glasses on the tip of his nose, a lace of greasy crumbs on his lapels, his briefcase clutched at his side, rolling down the street as fast as his plump body would go, jacket flapping open, his bored eyes skimming quickly over the girl and every other girl like her as he rushed to the office.

There was something sad and poignant about this image, but that didn’t prevent him from spending as much time staring at girls as he spent shopping.

I won't say much about the second story's even-bigger-cad except that it is his extended memory/fantasy innerworld as this Dude navigates his sold-out way around . This story's sordidly onanistic ending is also its protagonist's barely conscious beginning, and lying-to-self middle: The image became tiny and unnaturally white, was surrounded by darkness, then faded like the picture on a turned-off TV."

Similar levels of self-deceptive self-talk permeate story #5 of 9, "Connection", as well, though in this case our lyric voice is no trashscan Sinatra but a self-congratulatory supposed do-gooding ex-friend of a woman (possibly) spied now down-and-out and very much on-the-street. Concerning this one, you really have to marvel as the do-gooding shifts ever-so-slowly towards Ungood as our hero, Susan, makes her own way through Professional Life in the Big City—less sordidly than in the preceding story, perhaps, though no less damnèdly, or at least doomèdly, for all that. Even though "Connection"'s ending is arguably less totallizingly bleak that some othe rthe others, protagonist Susan is perhaps the character I liked the very least in this collection—and that's saying something, for Bad Behaviour is decidedly not a book for someone addicted to "liking" much less (one hopes) identifying with its characters...I guess I just really, really didn't find Susan's glib condescension bearable, really, when it comes down to it—though I definitely salute her author for making me feel that way.

Susan felt an ache of futile tenderness for Leisha and she impulsively reached out and stroked her four serial earrings the way she would pet a cat.

A little bit further down the infinitely-spiralling staircase, with "Trying to Be" we get, sort of, a conflation of two worlds Gaitskill traipsed us through earlier: sex work and the just-revisited PLBC. Here (and in kind of an obverse to the John in "Something Nice", our person of concern "Stephanie" has a foot- or rather toe-hold on both worlds, since "tricking was just something she slipped into, once a year or so, when she was feeling particularly revolted by clerical work." Stephanie also fantasizes a third world of possibility for her life, imagines that she is sure that she should/can/must/might/could be a writer, but falls for an image she projects onto one nice enough John anyway, by way of escape from all three worlds perhaps.

This story is also responsible for my favourite passage in the book, one which conflates Stephanie's two worlds neatly—and wryly:

“If you really want to be a writer, then don’t move to New York. You’ll just wind up in some dank little dump in the East Village with bars on the windows, and oh, I don’t know.” He grimaced and flapped his hand with distaste.

She reminded him that she had already moved to the city and he said, “Well, in that case, maybe you should try The New Yorker. They generally hire only friends and family, but you have a certain, I don’t know, fresh, insipid look they might like.I’ve gotten quite a few people in there. Would you like to have a drink tomorrow evening?”

I don't have much to say about "Other Factors", which for some reason didn't make much of an impact upon me (or at any rate I don't remember very well) except to say that it hews close to PLBC world, but shares much its time and by contrast with Lesbian Domestic Life in a way that reminded me of Dickens's Wemmick surviving the rigours of London Dog Eat Dog, Inc. by constructing a literal, defensive moat around his home and hearth (and heart).

But the longer 7th and (much longer) 9th stories are my absolute favourites here, and worth the price of admission alone. In the 7th, "Secretary" we see a young girl, "Debby" (here uncharacteristically delivered in first person by same) who does not particularly want either to be an adolescent, nor to grow up, but is forced to do so first by her parents, then by her employer, and finally by a muckraking journalist. As for the first,

Mother would drive me around to look for jobs. First we would go through ads in the paper, drawing black circles, marking X’s. The defaced newspaper sat on the dining room table in a gray fold and we argued.

“I’m not friendly and I’m not personable. I’m not going to answer an ad for somebody like that. It would be stupid.”

“You can be friendly. And you are personable when you aren’t busy putting yourself down.”

“I’m not putting myself down. You just want to think that I am so you can have something to talk about.”

“You’re backing yourself into a corner, Debby.”

“Oh, shit.” I picked up a candy wrapper and began pinching it together in an ugly way. My hands were red and rough. It didn’t matter how much lotion I used.

“Come on, we’re getting started on the wrong foot.”

“Shut up.”

My mother crossed her legs. “Well,” she said. She picked up the “Living” section of the paper and cracked it into position. She tilted her head back and dropped her eyelids. Her upper lip became hostile as she read. She picked up her green teacup and drank.

“I’m dependable. I could answer an ad for somebody dependable.”

“You are that.”

Her employer, a creepy lawyer (or is that lawyering creep?) well, at first we might attribute to him what Debby attributes to her life as a whole now:

I’d go to sleep at night looking at the skirt and blouse I would wear the next day. I’d wake up looking at my ceramic weather poodle, which was supposed to turn pink, blue or green, depending on the weather, but had only turned gray and stayed gray.

But, as ever, "There had been a catastrophe hidden in the folds of my contentment" (such as it discontentedly was)...I won't spoil why, or why the journalist gets involved, though!

Finally, with much, much longer "Heaven" we get a tiny (by comparison) Buddenbrooks: the Decline of a Family—something which, though hardly formally or thematically novel, felt like it should have been extended into one—to the length of a novel, I mean. I was that captivated by it.

At the story's outset, as with Faulkner's "That Evening Sun" (or Michael Cunningham's equally, miraculously devastating "White Angel"), say, we learn of the tragedy that has eviscerated them all, son Charles's death, but that is really the coup de grâce here, not what Aristotle might call the Efficient (preciptative) Cause. No, that thing is much more complicated and un-root-out-able, almost, though Gaitskill does most exceptional yeoman's work in her attempt to "flesh it out", revealing the mystery for what it often truly is in the process, I might add. As well as how most of us numb ourselves to that mystery over, and through, perhaps because of, time.

“You know, something I’ve noticed since I’ve gotten older is my sensitivity to nature,” said Anne. “When I was very young—a teenager—the sight of a sunset or a mountain scene was so deeply moving to me, I would get the chills.” She looked at Magdalen and shivered her shoulders. “And then, as I entered my twenties, I lost that sensitivity.”

“Well, I’m sure it wasn’t lost. You just had to concentrate on other things,” said Virginia.

“I suppose,” said Anne. “But there came a point when I hardly responded to nature at all. I still liked it, but it didn’t move me. Now that I’m on the verge of becoming an old lady, I’m starting to respond to nature again, to be stirred by the great outdoors.” She looked at Jarold with vulnerable eyes, her glasses down on her nose.

“That’s wonderful,” he said. “It shows you’re still excited by life. And that’s the most important thing to keep through the years, more important than money or success. A lot of us lose it.”

“I believe that,” said Anne. “That’s why I enjoy working with old folks. It’s marvelous to watch some of them blossom again, especially the ones who’ve been in those horrible nursing homes. They can be like kids with the openness—it’s exciting to give them another chance to experience it.”

Here's the thing, though: these characters (these people, damnit!), may talk about it occasionally, but they cannot really feel it, much less live by it. At least not with much facility, or regularity—or with Other People, much less themselves. Shoulda been a full-length novel, this'un.

Still in the shoegazing, new moon mood Gaitskill has induced in me, I shall end with first her epigraph, and then one of T.S. Eliot's (a bit of Dante)!

All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
—W. H. Auden, September 1, 1939

If I thought that my reply were given to anyone who might return to the world, this flame would stand forever still; but since never from this deep place has anyone returned alive, if what I hear is true, without fear of infamy I answer thee..."
—Inferno, Canto 27

[dani ༊ · Rating 3 out of 5]

ˏˋ°•*⁀➷ 3.5/5 stars *ੈ✩‧₊˚

ˏˋ°•*⁀➷ author writes book about horny people doing terrible things to one another. so really it’s just like an episode of any reality tv show.

[Britt · Rating 4 out of 5]

​I have always preferred wine over beer. And then I had sour beer, and I fell in love. I skipped dating, the awkwardness of that first sex, and went straight to love. I have always preferred the novel over short stories. And then I read Mary Gaitskill’s “Bad Behavior,” and I fell in love. Gaitskill turns me on. But, not like you think. She is deliberate, and masterful in her use of language, often her sentences were dizzying in their effect upon me. Several times I found myself jarred from my reading reverie by a particular turn of phrase, or word choice. One character finds upon waking from a dream he has a “mosquito-bite feeling of loss” (77) and instantly I could, in a most odd way, understand the level he was feeling.  In another story Lisette, a prostitute walks towards a client “as if he were a dentist, except she was smiling” seemingly incongruent within the stories space, it pitch-perfectly depicts a feeling, and our understanding.
​In the stories “A Romantic Weekend” and “Secretary” Gaitskill plays with the themes of power, control, and BDSM. She shrewdly depicts the spider’s web of power structure. Gaitskill navigates this web, and its inherent stickiness, while deftly avoiding voyeuristic clichés and saving the sermons for church. One particular (unnamed) character, when disillusioned with her sexual partner, defines her own needs best when she says “How… could she have mistaken this hostile moron for the dark, brooding hero who would crush her like an insect and then talk about life and art” (43).  She is looking neither to condone her predilections, nor to apologize for them. “Secretary” explores the same theme in a divergent way, examining it through a different lens. The woman in this story perceives her boss spanking her as humiliating, propelling her to realize “that the concept it stood for had actually been a major force in [her] life for quite a while” (143).
Throughout all of Gaitskill’s stories is a thread that ties all of them, and all of us together. The characters in each of her stories grapple with the messiness of being human, and of memory and its slippery nature. Through her characters inner and outer life we see both the ugly and beautiful of the human condition. And just like the characters we try to “discover the places” we also inhabit. In “Other Factors” Constance tries to understand a former friendship, attempting to make sense of its failure. While her despondency borders on the dramatic, the emotion behind it is relatable.  Similarly, the demise of a friendship gives way to questions of the eponymous “Connection” we have to others. Why do we have such a need to make these connections? Why do they often prove to be tenuous? Just as the characters sprinkled in Gaitskill’s stories look to fill some emptiness, some particular need in them, through others, so do we. And just as these characters posthumously attempt to make sense of the friendship death, so may we. Have I not asked of myself, of my own emptiness, the same questions Susan asks of Leisha in “Connection?” I wonder if my inner circuitry contains some disconnects also.  
"Why did Leisha feel empty? What did empty mean? What should exist in Leisha that didn’t? Was it a quality that other people had? She tried to imagine what Leisha looked like inside and pictured a set of dull-colored wires, some dead, others short-circuited and flickering in the dark, discharging a profusion of heat and bright color that sparked wildly, blew fuses and went dead" (98).
The individuals that inhabit Gaitskill’s stories seem to all struggle with different dead wires. Each tries in their varied and interesting to ways to splice wires back together, to make meaningful connections within themselves and with others. Even if they are mostly unsuccessful in their efforts I value their struggle, and find solace in their exposed frailty. I pass no judgment on their lives and choices; I accept their abject humanity as bits of my own. The common thread of the struggle for something real, of something beautiful is what binds these stories together.
Gaitskill’s overarching themes provide continuity and commonality, but also prove to be a pitfall when reading too quickly. These stories should be digested separately and slowly, first to appreciate the way Gaitskill forms and molds language, but also to keep the details from becoming muddled. Just like a nice wine, or a fabulous sour beer, these should sipped and savored.

[Kelsey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Anais Nin if she didn't write about incest

[Kiran Bhat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mary Gaitskill is a unique observer of the human condition. Though I have not read her work for many years, I found remember reading Gaitkill's short story collection Bad Behavior when I was a student at NYU (not for a course, just for myself). Gaitskill's characters are gut-wrenching, and though she has a penchant to steer into her version of familiar territory (forlorn, abused white women), she can inspire a lot of pathos in a small set of pages. I can still remember the sense of shame and humiliation in the story "Secretary," and how it captures how a lot of women who are sexually harassed in the workplace feel.

Gaitskill's best book is ultimately one of her first ones, but it has cemented her reputation as one of the most unique and interesting writers of her generation, and for that alone, it is worth a read.

[Peyton · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I felt a numbness; I felt that I could never have a normal conversation with anyone again."

9/10

[Paul Raud · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn’t think I’d like Gaitskill. Drugs, alcohol, and sex in 1980s New York – Interesting? Sure. A new favorite? I don’t think so. But I’d heard some interesting praise, especially for the early story collections, and circled the books for a while before I finally had to read some texts for class. I was hooked, slowly but surely.

Gaitskill managed to touch something deep down inside of me, not simply evoke strong emotion as many good writers do, but also connect with something quintessentially me, often enough plucking at feelings I wasn’t really conscious of before. Even though Gaitskill’s characters are worlds apart from me, I related to them on a very personal level; at times, it felt as if Gaitskill was putting into words something I had struggled with.

It’s not a perfect book by any measure: it’s quite messy and (purposefully) unpolished at times, and sometimes the messiness works beautifully and other times not so much. I no longer remember much of the content of the stories, but the way the book touched me is very much still working away somewhere beneath the surface.

Because They Wanted To waiting for me on the shelf.