Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill, Mary Gaitskill, Mary Gaitskill (Editor)

Biography

Mary Gaitskill is the author of Veronica, nomiated for a 2005 National Book award in the Fiction category. She is also the author of Because They Wanted To, which was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1998. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories (1993), and The O. Henry Prize Stories (1998). Her story "Secretary" was the basis for the film of the same name. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she teaches creative writing at Syracuse University. She lives in New York.

Author biography courtesy of Random House, Inc.

Feature Interview

What was the book that most influenced your life or your career as a writer?
This question is a hard one to answer, because influence is often unconscious and indiscriminate. When people are asked to name the books that influenced them, they usually name their most favorite (prestigious) authors -- the people they hope they were influenced by, and perhaps legitimately were.

I think I've been influenced by Vladimir Nabokov, simply because I've read him intensely for so many years. I would say the same to a lesser degree of Flannery O'Connor. But I think I've also been influenced by writers I actually don't admire as much because I read them early, at a crucial time in my writing life, and they touched me on a non-intellectual level. Some writers I would put in that category are Victor Hugo and Tom Wolfe, from whom I learned at the age of 17 that writing can be elastic, playful, and can work like sound.

Once, some jackass at a reading asked if I'd been influenced by Erica Jong -- which he clearly meant as an insult. I said no, but in fact I may've been without realizing it; I did, after all, read her at 16, and I'm sure her characters and voice have been secreted away in some cerebral fold that I don't know about anymore.

What are your ten favorite books, and what makes them special to you?
If I gave thorough reasons, this would be a 10-20-page essay. I don't think I can give an absolute set of ten favorites, because that varies with time; books come forward and fade back in one's thinking. Some of the books I am going to put on this current list are there because I read them recently, and because they hit the spot right now. A year from now, it could be a quite different list -- except for Lolita. Lolita will be on my ten favorites list until the end of my life. So: