Why is Bad Behavior So Good?

I was 22 when I read Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior for the first time. I had just graduated from college and moved from rural Vermont to New York City, and I had very little idea what I was doing. Sure, I sort of wanted to be a writer, but I also still thought that writers were these exalted figures—each one as lofty and inhuman as Nabokov—and I didn’t really believe I could ever be one. I got an internship at a culture website, and then, after a few months, I also got my first real job: sitting at the front desk at NYLON magazine. In addition to regular administrative and assistant-type duties, I was required to take out the enormous, invariably leaking bags of trash (But I graduated with honors, I would whisper to myself as the warm garbage juice trickled down my leg), to clean the tiny, abused kitchen, and sometimes also to clean the carpet after the owners’ oft-unwalked dogs had had their way with it. Most days I arrived at 8am and left at 8pm. I made $25k a year. I was miserable. Then I found Mary Gaitskill.

Now, don’t worry. I’m not about to tell you that Mary Gaitskill’s stories taught me how to live—or at least, not exactly. I mean, you wouldn’t actually want to live like any of the people in these stories, if you could help it. But like many young women, and many aspiring writers—young, female, and otherwise—I responded to Gaitskill’s stories instantly and intensely. I found them astonishing. I was seduced by the wildness of the characters, by their brazenness and force, even in the face of their own confusion, and often despite their inefficacy. I was interested and impressed, of course, by the amount and type of sex. Was this what adults were up to all this time?

But I was even more interested in the quality of mind with which Gaitskill imbued her characters. I had never read such chilly, sharp stories about women’s feelings. I had never read stories in which young women with what my mother might have called “questionable morals” were taken quite so seriously. Who knew, I thought, that women did these things? Who knew that they thought these things? Who knew that writers were allowed to chronicle these doings and thinkings? I loved the way the women in these stories refused convention, the way they failed to fit the female molds of goodness and kindness and beauty that had been presented to me as inescapable truths over and over again. I was, after all, working at a fashion magazine.

Several of the characters that populate these stories are aspiring writers, and this too endeared the book to me. It was hard not to read it as at least somewhat autobiographical; I turned it over and could see that Gaitskill had done quite all right for herself. Actually, I didn’t have to turn it over to realize that. I could tell it on every page.

But the overwhelming feeling I remember was one of permission, both as a human and as a writer. After a (short) lifetime of being told that it was men and only men who were allowed the complex stories, the unlikeable narrators, the mistakes and bad habits and cruelties, reading this book felt like peeling off an unwanted skin. I too could be taken seriously, I thought. I too could be chilly and sharp. I too could think such thoughts, and chronicle them.

That was almost a decade ago. Now, I read the stories differently, but I love them no less. Actually, I love them more. What appeals to me these days is no longer the titillating content, or even the brazen selfhood of the female characters (though I’m still into both of those things). What I appreciate most now is something much more essential to the work, and to life: bare, unromantic emotional realism. That is, in these stories, very little changes. Epiphanies and emotional breakthroughs are rare, but small meannesses are common. People are utterly unknowable to one another. They are often too tired to even try. These seem to me to represent essential realities about the world that are often glossed over, ignored, or rewritten in fiction—particularly the epiphany-based fiction that has until recently been the widely accepted norm.

I am also much more attuned, these days, to the enduring excellence of Gaitskill’s prose and her storytelling ability. Consider “A Romantic Weekend,” the second story in the collection and one of my favorites. It’s about a failed relationship, sort of. I won’t give more than that away. In it, Gaitskill does something you’re supposed to tell students of writing not to do: she switches wildly back and forth between two perspectives, inhabiting a close third person for each, sometimes with a hint of authorial intervention. Like this:

His narrow eyes became feral once again. “Women should be quiet.” It suddenly struck her that it would seem completely natural if he lunged forward and bit her face.

“I agree,” she said sharply. “There aren’t many men around worth talking to.”

He was nonplussed by her peevish tone. Perhaps, he thought, he’d imagined it.

He hadn’t.

That knife-edge turn of perspective! That matter-of-fact dismembering! It’s so good. It’s so deft. I love it. Not to mention all of the work that the single line of the female character’s imagination is doing. Not a word is wasted here.

Something else I want to point out: in the story “Other Factors,” Connie sees a dentist. “He did some dull, painful thing that caused a nasty taste in her mouth,” Gaitskill writes. This sentence, a perfect and perfectly horrible one, could appear in almost any of these stories.

The best books age with you. I mean not that these stories are ageless, though they are. (Sure, no one in this book has a cell phone. But you don’t even notice, because the stories are so immediate that they feel like they’re happening all around you.) I mean that when I was 22, I read a cleaned-up version of this collection, and now I read a grittier one. Of course the words were always the same, and it was me who changed. But when I think about it now, I think I somehow read the feel-good version of this collection back in 2008—the one that made me think my new adult life would be okay.

For instance, before I re-read the collection this week, I remembered the story “Secretary” as much closer to its 2002 film adaptation than it actually is. In the movie, Maggie Gyllenhall plays an awkward and self-harming young woman, who goes to work for an attorney who begins to sexually subjugate her. She is definitely into it. The end of the film is almost ludicrously positive. Like the most conventional of romantic comedies, it ends with the heroine being carried through a doorway in a wedding dress, and then her beloved washes her hair in a glamorous bathtub, and then there is an extremely tender sex scene. Then they begin their relatively normal and happy life together!

In the original story, Debby is also sexually subjugated by her boss. She is sort of into it—it makes her both masturbate furiously and hate herself more. Eventually she quits and returns, somewhat worsened, to the life she had before. At the end of the story she gets a call from a reporter who clearly has some idea of what the lawyer has done to her (and presumably, previous employees). These are the last two paragraphs:

I sat on the mildewed couch and curled up, unmindful of centipedes, I rested my chin on my knee and stared at the boxes of my father’s old paperbacks and the jumble of plastic Barbie-doll cases full of Barbie equipment that Donna and I used to play with on the front porch. A stiff white foot and calf stuck out of a sky-blue case, helpless and pitifully rigid.

For some reason, I remembered the time, a few years before, when my mother had taken me to see a psychiatrist. One of the more obvious questions he had asked me was, “Debby, do you ever have the sensation of being outside yourself, almost as if you can actually watch yourself from another place?” I hadn’t at the time, but I did now. And it wasn’t such a bad feeling at all.

The final note is the opposite of the one the film strikes: a retreat from the self into blankness, as opposed to an acceptance and celebration of one’s secret desires and utmost self. It is, I am sorry to say, the truer ending.

I feel that now is the moment where I should transition to talking about this book in the context of “our current political moment” and “#MeToo.” But this book transcends our current political moment. This book is not really interested in #MeToo. The fact that women are harassed, that they are seen as sexual objects, that they are abused, this is all taken for granted in this book. This book is not worried about that; it is invested in the complex selfhoods of the women (and some of the men) in question. The women in this book are not Strong Female Characters. They are people. They are often horrible. They are sometimes victims. They are sometimes prostitutes. They sometimes “win.” They sometimes lose and sometimes get lost. But they are neither celebrated nor condemned for these attributes or actions. Which is to say that this 30-year-old collection is much more feminist than most of what we’ve got going, even these days. Good thing we can still read it whenever we want.