Read Online Don't Cry: Stories by Mary Gaitskill - Free Book Online
Authors: Mary Gaitskill
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look at and go, Okay, now for the author who says, “We live in an entertainment society and it’s terrible!”
She was reading with two other people, a beautiful seventeen-year-old Vietnamese girl who wrote about rapes and massacres, and a middle-aged Canadian who wrote touching stories about his daughters. First the Vietnamese girl read about a massacre, then came the feminist writer She immediately began complaining, but she did it in a way that made her complaint sound like a special treat we might like to have. Her voice was sweet, with a sparkling rhythm that made you imagine some shy and secret thing was being gradually revealed. I felt caught off guard; she wore a full-length skirt and litde glasses and round-toed clog-style boots.
She wasn’t going to read, she said; instead, she was going to give a talk about the way she had been treated by the local media, as well-as by the festival organizers, who had described her in an insulting, unfair way in their brochure. I had not even read the brochure—I perhaps should’ve read it, but the information in such pamphlets is usually worthless—and from the look on other people’s faces, they
hadn’t read it, either. The author, however, didn’t seem to realize this. The brochure was not only insulting to her, she continued; it was an insult to all women, to everyone, really. They had ignored the content of her work completely, focusing instead on the most sensational aspects of her life—the prostitution, the drug use, the stay in a mental hospital, the attempt on her father’s life—in a way that was both salacious and puritanical. “It isn’t that these things aren’t true,” she said in her lilting voice. “They are. I was a prostitute for six months when I was sixteen and I spent two months in a mental hospital when I was eighteen. But I have also done a lot of other things. I have been a waitress, a factory worker, a proofreader, a journalist, a street vendor! I am forty-five years old and now I teach at Impala University West!”
There were cheers, applause; a woman in the back fiercely hollered, “You go, girl!” The author blinked rapidly and adjusted her glasses. “I can even understand it,” she continued. “It’s exciting to imagine such a kooky person off somewhere doing unimaginable stuff! I like the idea myself! But I am not that person!” It seemed to me that she kind of was that person, but right then it didn’t matter. “And when we do that,” she continued, “when we isolate qualities that seem exciting, but maybe a little scary, and we project them onto another person in an exaggerated form, we not only deny that person her humanity but we impoverish and cheat ourselves of life’s complexity and tenderness!”
This wasn’t funny. This was something wholly unexpected. We were all feeling stirred, like we were really dealing with something here, something that had just been illustrated for us by a magical, elfish hand. We felt like we were being touched in a personal place, a little like our mothers would touch us—a touch that was emotionally erotic. Like a mother, she seemed potent, yet there was something of the daughter there, too, the innocent girl who has been badly teased by an importune boy, and who comes to you, her upturned face looking at you with puzzlement. Yes, she seemed innocent, even with her sullied, catastrophic life placed before us for the purpose of selling her.
She must’ve sensed our feelings, because she cut short her speech. We had been so kind, she said, that she wanted to give us something. She was going to read to us after all—in fact, she had her book right there with her, and she even had a story picked out. It was a story about a middle-aged woman dressing in sexy clothes to attend a party for a woman who writes pornography, which is held in a bar decorated with various sex toys. A good-looking boy flirts with the middle-aged woman, who allows that she is “flattered.”
What had
She was reading with two other people, a beautiful seventeen-year-old Vietnamese girl who wrote about rapes and massacres, and a middle-aged Canadian who wrote touching stories about his daughters. First the Vietnamese girl read about a massacre, then came the feminist writer She immediately began complaining, but she did it in a way that made her complaint sound like a special treat we might like to have. Her voice was sweet, with a sparkling rhythm that made you imagine some shy and secret thing was being gradually revealed. I felt caught off guard; she wore a full-length skirt and litde glasses and round-toed clog-style boots.
She wasn’t going to read, she said; instead, she was going to give a talk about the way she had been treated by the local media, as well-as by the festival organizers, who had described her in an insulting, unfair way in their brochure. I had not even read the brochure—I perhaps should’ve read it, but the information in such pamphlets is usually worthless—and from the look on other people’s faces, they
hadn’t read it, either. The author, however, didn’t seem to realize this. The brochure was not only insulting to her, she continued; it was an insult to all women, to everyone, really. They had ignored the content of her work completely, focusing instead on the most sensational aspects of her life—the prostitution, the drug use, the stay in a mental hospital, the attempt on her father’s life—in a way that was both salacious and puritanical. “It isn’t that these things aren’t true,” she said in her lilting voice. “They are. I was a prostitute for six months when I was sixteen and I spent two months in a mental hospital when I was eighteen. But I have also done a lot of other things. I have been a waitress, a factory worker, a proofreader, a journalist, a street vendor! I am forty-five years old and now I teach at Impala University West!”
There were cheers, applause; a woman in the back fiercely hollered, “You go, girl!” The author blinked rapidly and adjusted her glasses. “I can even understand it,” she continued. “It’s exciting to imagine such a kooky person off somewhere doing unimaginable stuff! I like the idea myself! But I am not that person!” It seemed to me that she kind of was that person, but right then it didn’t matter. “And when we do that,” she continued, “when we isolate qualities that seem exciting, but maybe a little scary, and we project them onto another person in an exaggerated form, we not only deny that person her humanity but we impoverish and cheat ourselves of life’s complexity and tenderness!”
This wasn’t funny. This was something wholly unexpected. We were all feeling stirred, like we were really dealing with something here, something that had just been illustrated for us by a magical, elfish hand. We felt like we were being touched in a personal place, a little like our mothers would touch us—a touch that was emotionally erotic. Like a mother, she seemed potent, yet there was something of the daughter there, too, the innocent girl who has been badly teased by an importune boy, and who comes to you, her upturned face looking at you with puzzlement. Yes, she seemed innocent, even with her sullied, catastrophic life placed before us for the purpose of selling her.
She must’ve sensed our feelings, because she cut short her speech. We had been so kind, she said, that she wanted to give us something. She was going to read to us after all—in fact, she had her book right there with her, and she even had a story picked out. It was a story about a middle-aged woman dressing in sexy clothes to attend a party for a woman who writes pornography, which is held in a bar decorated with various sex toys. A good-looking boy flirts with the middle-aged woman, who allows that she is “flattered.”
What had
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