Mary Gaitskill agreed to speak with me in October, 2006, in Philadelphia at the Rittenhouse Hotel. She is a charming, witty and impressive lady. Ms. Gaitskill was also impressive in her ability to do the heavy lifting when it came to covering for the deficiencies of this interviewer’s questions. I would have liked to have talked with her for hours but even if she had been inclined to humor me, she was giving a reading later at the Philadelphia Free Library. A thank-you is owed to SSN’s Felicia Sullivan for the chance to chat with one of my favorite authors. I am also very grateful to Ms. Gaitskill for her graciousness in sharing with me what a writer guards closely: her time. I have edited, slightly, for content, for unintelligible words and words that don’t make sense out of context of the physical gestures that necessarily accompany a face to face meeting.

Krista McGruder: I love this book, Two Girls Fat and Thin. And this is a very personal question to start off with. But were you, as a young woman, influenced by Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead? What brought you to write this novel?

Mary Gaitskill: I wasn’t influenced by Rand as a young person. I discovered her books in high school. Other kids were reading them and I tried to read them but I thought that she [Ayn Rand] was terrible. I read one of the novels, Anthem, and thought it was ghastly—maybe I finished it, I don’t remember. But I didn’t—and I heard about her vaguely through the years—but I didn’t really get interested in her again until I was in my twenties, late twenties. I realized that a whole cult had grown up around her and a group of people even after her death were still holding meetings and following her ideas. I thought that was fascinating.

KLM: So you read all of her stuff or some of her stuff?

MG: I read all of it because I had decided to write an article about the cult.

KLM: All of it. Well, Anna Granite—when I started reading this [indicating MG’s book Two Girls Fat and Thin]—I had no idea it was about Rand and her following. A take-off of her. You’ve got the voice. You could continue writing her books. Her estate could assign you unfinished manuscripts-

MG: I don’t believe they’d want to.

KLM: But you know, you’ve got the voice. You’ve nailed it. I’ve marked this part [page 130, hardcover version of Two Girls Fat and Thin] because I want to talk about it. She reads The Bulwark in the middle of her seventeenth year and then she speaks to Dr. Mars about it:

And he says: “Well, it’s really normal to want life to matter. Sometimes it seems like it just doesn’t.”
She says: “I want people to be like Anna Granite’s people. Perfect and strong.”
Dr. Mars says: ‘That’s very normal adolescent idealism.”

KLM: And I thought, wow. Because if you’ve read your books, it seems like all of your characters have that longing to matter and be strong. And I didn’t know about Dr. Mars, how you felt about him, saying that, or if you have any feeling about him. Putting down that need to be perfect and strong.

MG: It’s both meant to be comical and serious. What he’s saying is perfectly true. It is a normal adolescent desire, but there’s something absurd about him saying that, especially to her. What she says, I want people to be like the characters of a novel, perfect and strong—it’s silly. There is no such thing as perfect, and while strong is good to idealize strength above all else is ridiculous. It’s narrow minded and rigid. But for a kid to say that—if I was a therapist and a kid said that to me I’d want to know, what is perfect to you? What is strong to you? What is your idea of perfect and strong in your life?

KLM: Just to swat her down--Just to pat her on the head.

MG: It’s a very automatic response. It’s kind of like checking off something on a list. But that’s what’s funny about it. Because he’s somebody who thinks he’s doing his job, and he is—but he’s also a little piece of nonsense that’s bubbled up from somewhere and taken form as this person. And yet he doesn’t know that. He thinks he’s a very serious guy and that he’s helping people.

KLM: I found it hilarious as well. I also found that—everybody can read anything they want into any book—but I found so many characters in your short stories and novels that there’s some woman, either young or old or whatever just longing to have strength and perfection in her life. And she hardly ever gets the happiness. Even in Veronica we wish she could get a little bit of happiness, which we could end on a happy note. But it never happens. It seems like they’re always longing.

MG: Certainly in America it’s the thing, everyone wants to be perfect and strong. I don’t know if that’s what everyone has always wanted in life. I think if people lived more in contact with physical adversity simply by living their lives—like if you live on a farm—I don’t think you’re going to have the illusion that you will be perfectly strong. Strong is certainly desirable but I don’t think you can have the illusion you can be perfect. Maybe people forever have wanted to be perfect and strong once their physical needs were answered and they no longer worried about starving to death. But it seems to me that something focused on in such a hell-bent way is going to make you unhappy. Because whoever you are, if by some standard you are perfect for a while you cannot remain that way. Even if you are strong you will not remain that way. There is always going to be someone stronger than you or more perfect--it’s a game that you cannot win. And it’s also profoundly narcissistic and disconnected from the world around you to have those goals, I think. Like I said I think American society in particular really puts people on that treadmill. And doesn’t let them off. But that’s a different subject from happiness. You don’t have to be perfect or strong to be happy.

KLM: You said something about living on a farm. I have this deep belief that New York writing—which is not what I would call your writing—and New York characters have no physical adversity whatsoever. Maybe a little worrying about paying the rent or buying the next model car but there’s no real physical adversity.

MG: Not much in my stories, either.

KLM: No, you have sickness of course, in Veronica. And then in you have people especially in your short stories that I would call underemployed, I guess, that have financial adversity. But you said something interesting about the farm. I went online and tried to learn a little bit about you. Somewhere I read—I don’t know if it’s true—that you’re from Kentucky.

MG: Yes, originally. Though I didn’t grow up there. I lived there as a child.

KLM: Where?

MG: Lexington.

KLM: Pretty good-sized city.

MG: Well it was much smaller when I lived there. We’re talking about Kentucky, gosh, thirty years ago. Forty-two years ago. Young childhood.

KLM: I haven’t seen it in your work. Does any of being raised in the middle or upper South—well, I know you weren’t raised there and I don’t know where you moved after Kentucky—I don’t seeing it coming into your work a lot.

MG: Actually Dorothy lives for a while in Tennessee I think. I can’t remember how long I had her living there.

KLM: I just wondered if that’s something that you thought about.

MG: No it’s not. I don’t think about regions very much. I’m sure I was influenced by the fact that I grew up in the Midwest and sometimes I wonder if I had spent more time in Kentucky—if I had actually grown up there—if I’d be somewhat different. It seems like every place has gotten more and more the same, but it was different then.

KLM: Sure. I think you dedicated this book—did you dedicate one book to your Mom and Dad? (Indicating Two Girls Fat and Thin) Are they still around?

MG: My mother is. My parents moved back to Kentucky after my father retired. But when he died she moved to Chicago to be with my sister because my sister had children and needed help with them.

KLM: Sure. In my experience, my mother wanted to move in with my brother to be with the grandbaby. I understand that, Grandma wanting to be close. Does she read your stuff?

MG: Yes.

KLM: Does she ever have any comments or suggestions?

MG: It’s definitely not her kind of thing. If I was not her daughter, she would not read it. Not sure how she feels. I don’t think my father ever read what I wrote. Perhaps he did but never talked about it. It’s also possible he never read it. My mother, though, has chosen to read it and that’s you know, made her think about it. So she has made a real effort to understand it and understand me through it. And I think that it’s interesting to her and taken her places that she wouldn’t normally go and some places she would not want to go. But I think that ultimately she’s been more impressed than anything else—even when she doesn’t care for it.

KLM: I need to ask you about that. It seems when I get to speak to, or be around, writers who’ve achieved a certain level of success in their career and have generally become regarded as good at their craft, most of their parents have no idea they are so well-regarded and are doing well. They just think, oh, that’s my kid that writes books with the dirty words. I just wondered if you ran into any of that. Did your mom give your books to people?

MG: Some people.

KLM: That’s great.

MG: One of the people she shows my stories to is her therapist.

KLM: (Laughs.)

MG: I think she has some sense of who she can show them to and who she can’t.

KLM: Good. She must be very proud especially with the success that Veronica’s had.

MG: She definitely liked Veronica more than she liked the other books--she could connect to it.

KLM: That’s good.

MG: A lot of people could, apparently. It surprised me.

KLM: I read an article about you in New York Magazine that I brought with me. In it, Emily Nussbaum says ultimately that Two Girls Fat and Thin is a “flawed novel.” That sort of got my dander up. Because I like that book. I wonder why she called it that. Do you have any notion why she would say that?

MG: I didn’t read that article. This may sound strange-

KLM: No, it doesn’t sound strange. I just needed to because I needed to try to learn a little bit about you. But I was mad.

MG: Well, I think that’s generally the conventional wisdom about Two Girls. I remember when it came out, people were very critical of it—I think there was an expectation that it was going to be like Bad Behavior and it really isn’t. But it’s starting to be read differently now. I get much more positive comments about it than I used to. When it first came out people felt quite justified in coming up to me and saying: You know, I really liked Bad Behavior but Two Girls, I just didn’t think that was very good.

KLM: Do you think it’s because they don’t like Rand or any subject dealing with her? It’s not worthy of a literary novel.

MG: I don’t think it was that. I think for most people the language isn’t subtle enough. Actually, there’s a lot of subtlety in the book, but there’s also some very broad use of language—I did that on purpose, and it was not a fashionable choice to make, especially at that time. But I think the biggest thing for most people of the intellectual variety, is that they think it’s “about”—and I’m putting quotes around that word—child abuse and therefore distasteful and even corny. The orthodoxy of the time was that you’re not supposed to write about victims because if you’re writing about victims it means you believe in the culture of victimization. It’s really stupid, the chain of associations that people will make. Also I think for some people it was too crudely sexual whereas Bad Behavior is kind of like chamber music in comparison. Bad Behavior was more like tasteful chamber music in a way and Two Girls was like really loud opera, which many people hear as screeching. Opera is simply not fashionable among the literati and that’s why. But because so many people said this to me, that it wasn’t as good as Bad Behavior—I don’t read the books I write until ten years after they come out-

KLM: Ten years.

MG: (Laughs.) Yes, I think it takes me that long to get objective.

KLM: At some point if you keep writing you may have to make an exception.

MG: (Laughs.) Maybe. But ten years after I wrote it, I read Two Girls expecting not to like it because so many people have talked as if it was really not very good and I was pleasantly surprised—I think it’s better than Bad Behavior.

KLM: It’s my favorite one.

MG: Thanks.

KLM: Sorry Emily Nussbaum. I don’t understand that comment. Do people object to the names? I mean, oh, it’s Justine Shade; we could have come up with that.

MG: Yeah, I think that was a comment about it being too broad in its humor. And some of the humor is very broad but some of it isn’t. Parts of it are comic book-like but that’s on purpose. You picked out Dr. Mars-

KLM: I thought that was hilarious.

MG: But I hope you don’t mind my disagreeing with you, I do consider Two Girls flawed. There are things I would change about that book now. When I read it, I was overall, very pleased with it. But there were a couple things I didn’t like about it. One thing, the Bryan character, he’s not a main character but he’s important because he makes things happen. I don’t think he’s—I don’t think I conveyed him well enough. If I was a reader of that book I’d think, she does not understand this character well enough. I think he’s unbelievable.

KLM: Oh, ok.

MG: The things he says and does are literally believable but to me, somehow, he doesn’t seem fully real on the page.

KLM: I’m going to have to go back and read him.

MG: And I don’t like the ending, either. If I were to re-write it, I might have Dorothy have the impulse to get into bed with Justine but I don’t think anyone after having the experience of nearly being strangled and having a violent sex-fest for hours…and then having this strange person come into your room and hurl your boyfriend into the hall, I don’t think you’d feel like going to sleep at that moment at all.

KLM: Well, she does go to bed with her arms around her. So they make peace with each other, somehow.

MG: That’s what I meant to convey. But I don’t think I’d have her literally get into the bed and go to sleep with her—though I might have her try and not be able to sleep, get up and leave. But it’s o.k., I mean, most novels are flawed. Many great novels are flawed, The Human Stain is flawed. It would be very unusual to come across a novel that’s not flawed in some way. I don’t know if that’s what you wanted.

KLM: No, it’s good. I just wanted your opinion on why you thought Nussbaum said that. In Veronica, I notice that you frame it, that she goes out for a walk through the park. There’s a terrific scene where she’s looking at the trees and the guy’s a little snippy with her. He says, “They’re not diseased.” Now obviously you’re a great enough writer to contrive that but I wondered if that was from a real experience. Where you’re standing there, looking out and the guy gets all snippy because, I guess, she doesn’t know as much about trees as he does. I don’t know if that was something that you came to—or you had to look it up—about the bark of the trees. Or something could have happened that you had that experience. I thought it was so cool.

MG: Somebody must have told me because I did use to live in that area. And when I saw the trees with the bark stripped off, that was my first thought. That there must be something wrong with them. There’s this really beautiful thing that looked—I didn’t know that some trees had the bark come off at certain parts of the season—it just looked dead. Unnatural in some way like there was something wrong. But I never had that particular conversation.

KLM: Here isn’t so much a question as a comment. You do an exceptional job—and it’s not all over the book—but little pieces here and there—of actually naming the flowers. Which is a really great way—if it’s intentional I don’t know—of giving the reader a sense of the seasonality. Which I think is great. Because so many times, especially when men write—I think Eudora Welty said something like, I know a man wrote that because he’s got the tulips blooming in June when they bloom in April. That kind of thing. So I thought that was really, really good. You did that a couple of times. It got me thinking: maybe she’s a gardener, an outdoorsy type woman in real life. You write this character that goes on this great hike.

MG: I like to walk and I’ve taken the walk that she is taking.

KLM: I wanted to ask you where she is walking. I don’t know the area that well.

MG: Larkspur. And you can take a bus from San Rafael and go to Larkspur pretty easily. And that’s a really beautiful walk. So that’s specifically what I had in mind. I don’t know if it’s important to name some things. I suppose it is.

KLM: I thought it was a clever plan. Tell us what coast we’re on and tell us what’s blooming then.

MG: Yes, it’s a good thing to locate people.

KLM: Absolutely. I also wanted to ask, there’s a scene—I didn’t mark it—but there are two models throwing themselves against the chain linked fence. I thought that’s just horrific. How did think of that scene? There’s a photographer…asking these two very young girls to hurt themselves. How did you think of that?

MG: I hate to admit it but I didn’t invent it. It came from something I learned about in real life.

KLM: Well, it really opened my eyes…It’s so sad—we could see it coming a mile away when Veronica died—she was a fantastic character—

MG: Thank you.

KLM: And somebody I would have liked to have known in real life, if she existed. Did you ever have any remorse about letting her go? Was she always destined to die?

MG: She was always destined to die.

KLM: Oh. There’s no looking back. She was a goner.

MG: Yes, it’s what the book is about from the beginning. Her death is the reason for the book to exist.

KLM: I went to your 92nd Street Y reading to try to get a little better sense of it last week—and you read the passage which I also thought was great about when Alison has to confront Veronica’s mother (I don’t know if she’s ever named in this book.) And Veronica’s mother is not a very likable person. She’s just kind of one of these frumpy women. I didn’t like her at all. But I thought that Alison was ultimately really kind and nice with her. She wasn’t super, super sweet but she did say that she [Veronica] suffered and died. She had AIDS. I thought that was probably the kindest thing that the character could have done for that mother. To give her a reality check at that point.

MG: In some sense I think it is the kindest thing to be truthful, but the mother probably didn’t experience that way. The mother is somebody who is really—earlier the reader has learned that she is someone who according to Veronica has behaved pretty horribly—crazy and really not able to truthful. So for her, truthfulness will by its nature feel terrible.

KLM: Well, all the details…the diuretics and the tea towels being thrown about the house. I don’t know where you got those or if you invented them but it does sound like the Mom is bad. I just thought that was a really remarkable thing that you did when you have the character be straight with her instead of just being really comforting, like it [Veronica’s death] was peaceful.

MG: Well the mother’s a character who…one of the sources of her badness is that she doesn’t want to look at what’s happening, even with her own daughter. She wasn’t present with her daughter through the illness at all. Just kind of didn’t respond. It was because she couldn’t bear to contact her. And so when Alison disabuses her it’s kind of like punching her in the stomach.

KLM: What about Veronica’s father? All the stuff, you know the scene with him, he and his wife they are agoraphobic. They won’t go out; they send the children out to shop. And I wasn’t sure if Veronica—I really wasn’t sure if she was telling a tall tale there.

MG: Oh, no.

KLM: It really happened. I kind of got the sense of that but thought she was maybe laying it on a little thick for her audience. Oh, poor me.

MG: I think she’s telling the truth but because of who she is she enjoys painting the most garish picture possible. It’s just the same way she puts on her makeup. Which she even acknowledges, she says, oh, you know me, I’ll say anything for a laugh. I’ll say anything for a good story. So in my mind she’s exaggerated a little and leaving out a little. She tells the story—wasn’t her mother, singing to them?—so there’s some sweet moments there too.

KLM: Well, again, I loved the book and probably not going to think of any more original questions that other people haven’t asked before. I wonder: are you working on anything now?

MG: Yes, I’m working on—there’s another novel I’ve been working on—God knows when I’ll finish it. I hope it doesn’t take another ten years. But, I’m also working on a collection of stories which I think I’ll be done with, I’m hoping to be done with it in the summer.

KLM: That’s really great. Do you show things to people in your writerly circle before you give them to, I guess, your editor and your publisher?

MG: I don’t really have a writerly circle.

KLM: You mean David Gates doesn’t come over and line-edit your stories for you? He’s so professorial with his large hair.

MG: Oh, you saw him at the reading.

KLM: When he came out I was like, whoa!

MG: I see him sometimes and I’m friendly with a couple of other writers but they don’t all know each other and we don’t share work among ourselves. The one person I really show things to before turning them in is my husband.

KLM: That’s nice.

MG: I think it’s possible to have too many eyes on the work.

KLM: And what’s his name, for the record?

MG: Peter.

KLM: Well, is he a writerly sort.

MG: He’s a writer. Peter Trachtenberg.

KLM: Well there you go, that’s good.

MG: Well, he doesn’t write fiction but I very much trust his point of view. It doesn’t mean that he tells me what to write or that I tell him what to write. But, I think it’s good for me to have him look at it. Before I was married the only person I would show it to—I would occasionally show it to writers—but the person I would consistently show things to was a friend who wasn’t a writer at all. She was just a very good reader.

KLM: Well, it’s good that you have a person that you trust. That’s great. And one more question. Was it so much fun reading with Edna O’Brien? Wasn’t she fantastic at the 92nd Street Y?

MG: She is quite the dame. She has an extraordinary animal magnetism.

KLM: Yes.

MG: Especially for an older person. I’d never met her before and that was the thing that most struck me about her. That’s the thing that most writers do not have. Most writers are—I mean it’s natural I suppose—but I think most writers are quite naturally introverted. And I don’t know if she’s introverted or not. But I think often with the introversion of a writerly character there’s a lack of physical presence. And she really had presence. I mean she was vibrating with it and I found that really magnificent.

KLM: I imagine it was an honor for her to be there with you as well.

MG: I don’t know that she thought that. She certainly didn’t say so.

KLM: She was good and you were great. I really enjoyed it. Do you like reading from your work?

MG: I do. I go through periods where I like it more than others. Sometimes—I’m getting to the point of reading from Veronica that I feel like I’ve read from it almost too many times—but the reading at the Y was still alive for me. It’s just hard to read something over and over again and have it be fresh for you.

SNN: Oh, I understand, if you’ve read something at least ten times.

MG: Oh, more than ten times.

KLM: I just wish you luck tonight in your reading. I know some people probably ask you about your influences. I know it’s something you’ve answered before. Do you want to tell me what they are?

MG: The answer I always give is that you don’t know your influences. People always mention their favorite writers when asked what their influences are. And while some of my favorite writers may have influenced me, I think influence is unconscious and I think it’s omnivorous. I don’t think it cares if something is good or not. Just some image or face or storyline or character—you may absorb it because it meant something to you at the time. It doesn’t have to do with quality, necessarily. I think I’ve been influenced, I would guess, by people I admire like Flannery O’Connor, Nabokov, simply because I’ve read them a lot.

KLM: Justine Shade. I wondered if that’s where it came from-

MG: Oh, yes. John Shade. Quite possibly. I honestly don’t know why I chose that name but it rings a bell with John Shade.

KLM: Why not? It’s a good a name as any. Flannery O’Connor is great. I grew up loving her—well, not growing up—but once I was introduced. There wasn’t a lot of literary fiction in our house. And I had some good English teachers and learned about good writers in college and afterward.

MG: Well, I’m sure that I’ve also been influenced by some people who aren’t so good but who may have impressed me at the time I read them. Tom Wolfe was somebody—once some very shrewd person when I was reading from Bad Behavior—kind of astonishing to me really that someone could see this—it was just somebody in an audience in a bookstore who said, Have you been influenced by Tom Wolfe? And I said, Thomas Wolfe? And he said, no, Tom Wolfe. Because, he certainly wasn’t a conscious influence when I was writing Bad Behavior but when I was a kid, I loved Tom Wolfe. Literally, he just excited me about writing, and I am sure he has affected me.

KLM: I love reading his books. I read them the second they come out. I find, maybe you do too, that among literary sorts it’s almost like you have to whisper, Oh, I read the new Stephen King book or I read the new John Grisham book.

MG: It’s become cool to like Stephen King.

KLM: It’s like that song, ‘I Was Country When Country Wasn’t Cool.’ I’ve always liked Stephen King. I haven’t read close to everything that he’s written as that would be a full-time job. And I like Tom Wolfe’s books. When I went to the M.F.A. program, people were saying, Oh, I read Nabokov and I’m reading Proust while I had just read the new Stephen King book. It’s kind of a scary thing to admit.

MG: Well, I’m reading a detective novel now which I love. It’s Japanese and I guess she’s very respected in Japan. It’s her first novel that’s been translated here. And I’m not sure I can say her name right. I think her last name is Kirino. I think the first name is Natsuo. I may be getting it wrong; I’m not familiar with Japanese names. It’s called Out and it’s really good. I don’t usually like detective fiction but this is really something.

KLM: Is it a male detective?

MG: Well, the focus is not on the detectives. The focus is on the murderer. There’s a group of women who work in a boxed lunch factory. Their lives are miserable and they’re married to—at least a few of them—are married to men they just don’t care about or who are actually awful and abusive. And one of them murders her husband. She just snaps and murders him. And then she tells one of the others and they help her dispose of the body. They become accomplices with her.

KLM: So it’s a conspiracy now. They’re keeping it quiet.

MG: And that’s just the start. One of them—they don’t intend to include her but she happens to see them doing it—winds up getting involved. And then gangsters, various gangsters come into the picture too. The whole underworld is going to become involved.

KLM: The yakuza, I think that’s what they’re called. I’ve seen some of the Japanese movies where they do bad things to people.

MG: Yes. I’m not done yet, but more bad things are surely going to happen. And the detectives that come on the scene—I don’t know if they’re going to wind up being characters…

KLM: It sounds good.

MG: It’s really good. But it does things that I don’t normally like that much. It’s definitely a plot-driven novel. And the characters are very important too. But it’s very much a plot-driven story and there’s not a whole lot of inner reflection. There’s some, but not much, and yet I’m really impressed with it. I don’t know how we got onto that.

KLM: Well, we started talking about things that wouldn’t necessarily be considered literary fiction. Do you teach at all? Or have you ever taught in the past? Do you teach now? When I was in David Gates’ class, for example, we read “Tiny, Smiling Daddy,” I think, one of your stories. We may have read another one. That might have been another class too. Darcey Steinke, do you know her?

MG: Yes.

KLM: I took her class too. And she assigned, I believe, at least one of your short stories, Amy Hempel and some others. Flannery O’Connor. And that, I thought, was great, because when you get to read a short story in a class run by a writer still working you can dissect and say what you’re thinking. I don’t know if what you teach in your class was literary but everything in my classes was very, very literary.

MG: Mine is too. I haven’t taught many novels because I usually teach workshops. Though I’ve taught literature classes too. But I’ve only taught a few novels. And they’ve been literary—although one of them—it’s a Nabokov novel, although it’s not one of his famous ones, its called Laughter in the Dark, it’s early-

KLM: I haven’t read it.

MG: Most people haven’t. It’s not a masterpiece like Lolita or Pale Fire. To me, it’s a transition book. There are two books he’s written which in my opinion are transitional—the other one being Invitation to a Beheading. Some of his early stuff is really interesting but if he hadn’t published later, it would be out of print.

KLM: Was Laughter in the Dark written in Russian?

MG: German. He was in Berlin when he wrote that.

KLM: He could write in a lot of languages.

MG: Yes. You’d probably enjoy it. It’s borderline trashy. It’s kind of an old guy desperate about a young girl, like a run-up to Lolita. It’s a middle-aged man, married man. Comfortably married, wealthy, but really sexually bored and he meets this young hottie and just completely goes crazy for her. And she just destroys him. She’s like a scheming, malevolent Lolita. She’s not the one who winds up dead. And parts of it, like I said, are really trashy and really move quickly. It’s a page-turner but it’s also got some really gorgeous writing. The characters are like cardboard almost. They’re like caricatures but it doesn’t matter.

KLM: Is it funny? Is there humor in there?

MG: It’s not as screamingly funny as Lolita—but it’s got some humor in it that works. It’s kind of a nasty humor. There’s real sadism to the book, in a Punch and Judy, Comedia del Arte style. But, I’ve had students object to it. They thought it was beneath them to read it because it isn’t a towering masterpiece.

KLM: It wouldn’t be beneath me to write it—to have written it.

MG: I feel like saying that to them: You’ll be lucky if you ever write anything this good in your life. Yes, it’s minor Nabokov. It’s better than anything you’re likely to do. And I may not be right, who knows, but the chances are they won’t write anything that good, at least not the ones with that attitude. It just seems a snotty attitude to me. But I don’t know if I’ve ever assigned anything that could be considered truly non-literary. Once I assigned something that was actually highly regarded when it first came out, but it’s out of print now. It’s a book of stories by a woman named Emily Praeger called A Visit to the Footbinder.

KLM: Oh.

MG: And, she actually was very honored when the book came out. She was considered, really, an important contemporary writer. It was ’82, or ’83, maybe when it came out. But since then, what happens often, happened to her. She kind of fell out of favor. But her stories were very fast-paced, magically clever, particularly one called the The Lincoln-Pruitt Anti-Rape Device. It’s a really crazy story about a Special Op platoon of prostitutes that goes in behind the scenes in Vietnam during the war-

KLM: To distract everybody.

MG: Yes. And to pose as Buddhist nuns. And the local Vietnamese men fall in love with them, and anyway, they are armed with secret, castrating diaphragms. And a lot of stuff goes on. It might not be considered literary by today’s standards and when I’ve handed it out in class sometimes people really, well, the undergraduates are shocked. I mean, I’ve boys practically put their hands over their genitals and ask, Did this Happen?

KLM: That’s funny because in one of the war-torn countries in Africa—and it’s been very controversial—groups have given women these anti-rape devices.

MG: Really, they’re actually a death-dealing anti-rape device?

KLM: Well, I don’t know if it’s death but there would be…severe problems. It’s very controversial. How can a doctor hand out a device to a woman that is inherently meant to maim and dismember? So it’s sort of an ethical conundrum.

MG: Remarkable.

KLM: I’ve read it. I’ve read it several places. I can send you the links if you like.

MG: You can send me the links to the anti-rape device?

KLM: Well, I don’t know what it’s called. But it’s something.

MG: Well, in the story it’s invented by this crazy little, this fanatical little military woman, Major Lincoln Pruitt.

KLM: That is very funny.

MG: It is very funny.

KLM: So do your students object?

MG: You know I haven’t handed it out lately. But yes, when I did hand it out they were like, it was beneath them. It wasn’t literary enough and also once I handed out H.P Lovecraft—now he is considered to be a literary cult figure, maybe he wasn’t then, or at least my grad students didn’t realize it. I actually didn’t realize it either. This was in mid-nineties. Anyway, one of my undergraduates gave me some Lovecraft stories. Do you know him?

KLM: I’m not familiar with the work but I know the whole thing. He is a cult figure for some people.

MG: Well, I’d never heard of him. I thought wow, this is a science fiction story and I can’t believe I really like it. Because I normally do not like science fiction. But I really liked this and so I handed it out to my graduate students. And they, too, apparently, didn’t know that Lovecraft has been literarily accepted because they were, like, ‘We’re reading science fiction?’ I talked to them about why I thought it was really good. At least a few of them, I think, were willing to pry their minds open. Other than that…it’s hard to find short stories that are not on the literary turf. Novels, yes, but short stories—

KLM: Probably because the only ones that get published are in literary magazines.

MG: Right.

KLM: There are some romance magazines that publish romance stories. And science fiction. When I was in high school I submitted fantasy and science fiction stories about robots and unicorns. They are not circulated in general bookstores and such.

MG: (Laughs.)

KLM: This has been really wonderful. You gave me more time than I expected and I really appreciate it.

MG: Thank you.

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