Mary Gaitskill is an American writer who has made sadomasochism, sex work, and emotionally jagged desire into serious literary material. For readers who know BDSM and fetish culture, she is a main voice of literary rough sex. The work does not run a consent workshop in prose. It looks straight at power, shame, and appetite. The people she writes are adults. When the subject is taboo, the tone is level, not a freak show.
The writing sits on an early life. She was born in Lexington, Kentucky. As a teenager she ran away and sold flowers in San Francisco. At eighteen she chose writing because too much in the world was wrong and she had to say something. That indignation stays in the essays, which record what she has actually done: becoming a born-again Christian at twenty-one and lapsing, and years working as a stripper and a call girl. The desire and the pain in the fiction have that grain.
The reputation sits on the story collection Bad Behavior. It took about four years to find a publisher. The stories move between women’s points of view and men’s. “Secretary” is the only first-person story, and it stays inside the psychology of dominance and submission. “A Romantic Weekend” splits the point of view and takes romantic sex apart. She follows women through inner conflict and writes prostitution, addiction, and S/M as ordinary difficult material. In the Harper’s essay “On Not Being a Victim” she steps into arguments about date rape and victimhood, and she stresses how subjectivity blocks any single agreed conclusion.
The 2002 film Secretary is based on the Bad Behavior story of the same name, and the two share little. She called the film heavy with charm, pleasing in the way Pretty Woman is, and she noted that once an adaptation exists, viewers can judge it themselves. The distance is her holding onto what the story actually is. In 2023 she published a retelling of “Secretary” in The New Yorker and looked at that workplace power relation through a MeToo lens. Speaking of the protagonist, she said the perverse awakening made her feel more alive than before or since, and that the price was heavy.
In the novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin the journalist Justine Shade (thin) interviews Dorothy Never (fat). Dorothy is unstably committed to “Definitism” and its founder “Anna Granite,” a thin satire of Objectivism and Ayn Rand. Anna Granite is not the real founder of Objectivism. Gaitskill describes Justine’s masochism as aggression turned inward. It looks like self-contempt and is really contempt for everything, inverted. The root is not necessarily sexual abuse. It is a childhood world too thin to give her a full self. Disgust becomes “the gestalt of who you are,” and the masochism says, in effect: I will make myself a debased object, because that is what I think of your love.
Veronica follows a former fashion model and her friend, who has AIDS. Gaitskill mentioned the novel in a 1994 interview, set it aside that year, and returned to it in 2001. Wyatt Mason, writing in Harper’s in March 2006, was talking about four books across eighteen years and a writer asking how to live in a world that cannot be read. The earlier books describe places where people get stuck. Veronica finally shows life as a meaningful release as well. In the multi-voice novel The Mare, the middle-aged woman Ginger meets the young adolescent Velvet, also called Velveteen, through the Fresh Air Fund. Velvet’s age is a fact about a character. It is not sexual content.
Gaitskill is known for S/M, and she does not treat the Marquis de Sade as a main literary influence. She has said she does not think much of him as a writer, though as a child she liked masturbating to his work. Vladimir Nabokov and Flannery O’Connor stay in the line she claims. The nonfiction, including Somebody with a Little Hammer and Oppositions, keeps asking how the culture argues about sex. The novella This Is Pleasure goes into MeToo-era fights over accusation, loyalty, and sexual misconduct in the literary world. She does not trust a tidy moral algorithm. She writes desire while it is still muddy.
A reader can start with Bad Behavior for the concentrated D/s charge, read Two Girls, Fat and Thin for masochism across a whole novel, and then read the 2023 “Secretary” retelling to see the same workplace desire after the public language of harm has changed. She will not tell you how to use a cane safely. She writes what it feels like when desire, class, and cruelty tangle. From Bad Behavior in 1988 to Oppositions in 2023, that is the work. It is not a manual for hitting people.
