Mary Gaitskill
Harman Writer-In-Residence, Fall 2014
(Photo by Hillary Harvey)
Mary Gaitskill is the author of the novels Two Girls, Fat and Thin and Veronica, as well as the story collections “Bad Behavior,” “Because They Wanted To” and “Don’t Cry.” Her story “Secretary” was the basis for the feature film of the same name. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. In 2002 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction; in 2010 she received a New York Public Library Cullman Center research grant. Her novel Veronica was nominated for the National Book Award in 2005. She has taught at UC Berkeley, the University of Houston, New York University, The New School, Brown and Syracuse University; last year she was the Writer-In-Residence at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She is at present teaching writing and literature at Claremont McKenna College.
An excerpt from Veronica…
“Yes, we were stupid for disrespecting the limits placed bfore us; for trying to go everywhere and know everything. Stupid, spoiled and arrogant. But we were right, too. I was right. How could I do otherwise when the violence of the unsaid things became so great that it kept me awake at night? When I saw my father sitting in a chair, desperate to express what was inside him, making a code out of outdated symbols even his contemporaries could no longer recognize? When I saw him smile because my mother fell on her face then put the smile away like it was a piece of paper? When I heard him rail against dying men because otherwise he had no form to give his hates and fears? All the meat of truth was hidden under a dry surface with a shout. We wanted to have everything revealed and made articulate, everything, even our greatest embarrassments and lusts.”
Tuesday, October 28, 2014, 5:45 pm
A reading and conversation with Mary Gaitskill in the Asriel and Marie Rackow Conference Room, Room 750, Information and Technology Building, Baruch College.
Mary Gaitskill reading an excerpt from her nonfiction short story, “Lost Cat.”
Mary Gaitskill with one of her students.
Students at the event.
*Photo credit: Glenda Hydler