The novelist and essayist on the disturbing power of Lolita, her regard for John Cheever, and her aversion to simplistic arguments
Mary Gaitskill, 66, is the author of This Is Pleasure, a novella about a #MeToo scandal in the New York book industry, as well as three novels and three story collections, including her 1988 debut Bad Behaviour, whose story Secretary was the basis of the 2002 film starring Maggie Gyllenhaal in the title role as an office junior in a sadomasochistic relationship with her boss. Her new book, Oppositions, is a collection of essays dealing candidly with subjects that include rape and child abuse: reviewing the US edition, the Boston Globe praised her “gift for traversing taboo territory with a subtlety that’s sometimes downright Jamesian… [she] draws on her personal experience to crack the veneers of the social codes and sexual ambiguities we all navigate”. Gaitskill, who grew up near Detroit and ran away in her teens to San Francisco, spoke to me from upstate New York.
These essays might have been titled Against Simplicity…
I get very disturbed when I feel something is being presented in an overly broad way. I have a nuanced mind, for better and worse. For a writer, it’s generally good. For a person who has to sit on a school board or judge a court case, it probably isn’t. Fortunately, I don’t do those things.
