Mary Gaitskill

Mary Gaitskill in 2010

Mary Gaitskill (born November 11, 1954 in Lexington , Kentucky ) is an American author . She uses short stories , essays and novels etc. a. deal with the topics of sexuality and BDSM . Her story Secretary , published in Bad Behavior , served as a template for the US feature film of the same name from 2002. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker , Harper's Magazine , Esquire , The Best American Short Stories (1993 and 2006) and The O. Henry Prize Stories (1998) published.

life and work

Mary Gaitskill graduated from the University of Michigan with a BA and received a Hopwood Award . In her essay Revelation , she describes how at the age of 21 she became a "born again Christian ", but left the movement after six months. In 2001 she married the writer Peter Trachtenberg . After long periods in Toronto , San Francisco and Marin County , California , she has lived in New York City since 2005 .

After Gaitskill had tried to publish her works since she was 23, she made her book debut with her prose volume Bad Behavior in 1988. An essential motif of her work is the inner engagement of women with their different roles, whereby she regularly describes "taboo topics" such as prostitution , addiction and BDSM very clearly. Gaitskill claims to have worked as a stripper and call girl in the past . She showed the same frankness about her past with the confession of her own fate as a rape victim in her essay "On Not Being a Victim" for Harper's .

The American feature film Secretary by director Steven Shainberg from 2002 is based on her story of the same name in Bad Behavior . The film and the novel have little in common. Gaitskill characterized the film as "the pretty woman version" of her work, which clearly focuses on the charm of the original and is a bit too pleasing. Nevertheless, she found that, in the end, a successful film adaptation not only means additional income and a higher profile for her, but also enables people to start thinking about the subject of the film on the basis of this.

In 1989, Bad Dealing in Germany was published; In 1992 the novel In the Mirror of Others followed . In 2020, Bad Dealing was published in a new German translation.

Awards

Gaitskill received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002 and a 1998 PEN / Faulkner Award nomination for Because They Wanted To . In 2005 "Veronica" was nominated for the National Book Award and was also a finalist in the National Book Critics Circle that year . In 2020 she became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

Publications

• Bad Behavior (dt. Bad company - stories), 1988 ISBN 0-671-65871-9 .
  • Bad Behavior. Bad Company. New translation by Nikolaus Hansen, Blumenbar Verlag, Berlin 2020, ISBN 978-3-351-05079-5 .
• Two Girls, Fat and Thin (Eng. In the mirror of others - novel), 1991, ISBN 0-671-68540-6 .
• Because They Wanted To , 1997, ISBN 0-684-80856-0 .
• Veronica (novel), 2005, ISBN 0-375-42145-9 .
• "Revelation," in Communion: Contemporary Writers Reveal the Bible in Their Lives , David Rosenberg (Ed.), ISBN 0-385-47484-9 .
• The Lost Cat (Eng. The disappeared cat - Memoir, 2014, ISBN 978-3-03820-004-8 ), 2009, Granta , 107.
• The Mare . 2016.

Web links

• Interview with Alexander Laurence (1994)
• Author Interview 2005 Barnes & Noble's "Meet the Writers"
• "Mary, Mary, Less Contrary" (Emily Nussbaum, New York Magazine, November 14, 2005).
• The March 2006 Harper's had a notable review (not online, it appears) of Veronica by Wyatt Mason that also covered Gaitskill's earlier work. At Slate.com , Mason called Veronica "the best book of fiction in recent memory."
• Real Audio Interview with Mary Gaitskill (1991)
• 2006 Reading report, "Gaitskill with Edna O'Brien at 92nd Street"
• Podcast Interview (2006) (The Bat Segundo Show # 81)
• "The Lost Cat" (2009) (Granta 107)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ 2020 newly elected members. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed March 5, 2020 .