Mary Gaitskill

Mary Gaitskill's new book is the essay collection Somebody with a Little Hammer.

From her Q&A with Laurel Nakadate for Interview magazine:

NAKADATE: When you were going through your essays and deciding which ones would appear in the book, did you have a sort of "this is your life" moment as you went through the essays from, say, the early '90s?

GAITSKILL: I did. It was more, oddly, a manner of tonality than subject matter. There were certain tones that I would never use now and that seemed very foreign to me. I think, as we go through life, we can sometimes, while still staying essentially true to ourselves, pick up mannerisms or modes of expression that are like curlicues. And there was a lot of that that I recognized sometimes. And I remembered, sometimes dimly, why those phrases felt so tasty to me, why that particular curl felt so good to me. But from my point of view now, it was almost inaccurate. It changed the meaning of what I was saying in a way that it seemed like...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue