Author Bio
• Birth—November 11, 1954
• Where—Lexington, Kentucky, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Michigan
• Currently—Rhinebeck, New York
Mary Gaitskill is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories (1993, 2006, 2012), and The O. Henry Prize Stories (1998).
Personal
Gaitskill was born in Lexington, Kentucky and attended the University of Michigan, where she earned her B.A. and won a Hopwood Award.
She has lived in New York City, Toronto, the Bay Area in California, where she sold flowers in San Francisco as a teenage runaway. In a conversation with novelist and short story writer Matthew Sharpe for BOMB Magazine, Gaitskill said she had wanted to become a writer from the age of 18 because "things are wrong in the world and I must say something.'"
Gaitskill married the writer Peter Trachtenberg in 2001. They separated in 2010. Gaitskill lives in Rhinebeck, New York.
Writing
Hoping to get pubished from the time she turned 21, Gaitskill finally made her book debut at the age of 34, with her 1988 story collection Bad Behavior. "Secretary," a story from the collection, deals with sadomasochism and is the basis for the 2002 film of the same name. Starring James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal, the film according to Gaitskill has little in common with the story. Gaitskill referred to the adaptation as "the Pretty Woman version, heavy on the charm (and a little too nice)."
Gaitskill's fiction typically centers on the inner conflicts of female characters and on subject matter often deemed taboo—not only sadomasochism but also prostitution and addiction. Gaitskill has been open about her own career choices, saying she had worked as both a stripper and call girl. She showed similar candor discussing her own rape in a Harper's essay, "On Not Being a Victim.
Recognition
Gaitskill's honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002 and a 1998 PEN/Faulkner Award nomination for Because They Wanted To. Her novel Veronica (2005) was a National Book Award nominee, as well as a National Book Critics Circle finalist for that year. That book is narrated by a former fashion model and centers on her friend Veronica who contracts AIDS. Writing in a 2006 Harper's article, Wyatt Mason said:
Through four books over eighteen years, Mary Gaitskill has been formulating her fiction around the immutable question of how we manage to live in a seemingly inscrutable world. In the past, she has described, with clarity and vision, the places in life where we sometimes get painfully caught. Until Veronica, however, she had never ventured to show fully how life could also be made a place where, despite all, we find meaningful release.
Gaitskill's favorite writers have changed over time, but one constant has been Vladimir Nabokov, whose Lolita, she has said, "will be on my ten favorites list until the end of my life." Another consistently named influence is Flannery O'Connor. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/7/2015.)