1. Mary Gaitskill was born on November 11,1954 and is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer.
13 Facts About Mary Gaitskill
1. 2.
Mary Gaitskill's work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories, and The O Henry Prize Stories.
3.
Mary Gaitskill's books include the short story collection Bad Behavior and Veronica, which was nominated for both the National Book Award for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.
4.
Mary Gaitskill sold flowers in San Francisco as a teenage runaway.
5.
Mary Gaitskill married writer Peter Trachtenberg in 2001; they divorced in 2010.
6.
Mary Gaitskill has taught at UC Berkeley, the University of Houston, New York University, The New School, Brown University, Syracuse University, and in the MFA program at Temple University.
7.
Mary Gaitskill has previously been a Writer-In-Residence at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and Baruch College.
8.
Mary Gaitskill attempted to find a publisher for four years before her first book, the short story collection Bad Behavior, was published in 1988.
9.
Mary Gaitskill's fiction is typically about female characters dealing with their own inner conflicts, and her subject matter matter-of-factly includes many "taboo" subjects such as prostitution, addiction, and sado-masochism.
10.
Mary Gaitskill says that she had worked as a stripper and call girl.
11.
Mary Gaitskill revisited her short story Secretary in 2023, not as a sequel, but as a retelling.
12.
Mary Gaitskill received the Arts and Letters Award in Literature from The American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2018.
13.
Mary Gaitskill mentioned working on the novel in a 1994 interview, but that same year she put it aside until 2001.