Podcasts Education Self-Improvement Conversations with Tyler Mary Gaitskill on Subjects That Are Vexing Everybody

Mary Gaitskill on Subjects That Are Vexing Everybody

Published: Nov. 2, 2022, noon

Mary Gaitskill\u2019s knack for writing about the social and physical world with unapologetic clarity has led to her style being described both as "cold and brutal\u201d and \u201ctender and compassionate.\u201d Tyler considers her works The Mare, Veronica, and Lost Cat to be some of the best and most insightful American fiction in recent times. And lately she\u2019s taken to writing essays on Substack, where she frankly analyzes \u201csubjects that are vexing everybody,\u201d including incels, Depp v. Heard, and political fiction.

She joined Tyler to discuss the reasons some people seem to choose to be unhappy, why she writes about oddballs, the fragility of personality, how she\u2019s developed her natural knack for describing the physical world, why we\u2019re better off just accepting that people are horrible, her advice for troubled teenagers, why she wouldn\u2019t clone a lost cat, the benefits and drawbacks of writing online, what she\u2019s learned from writing a Substack, what gets lost in Kubrick\u2019s adaptation of Lolita, the not-so-subtle eroticism of Victorian novels, the ground rules for writing about other people, how creative writing programs are harming (some) writers, what she learned about men when working as a stripper, how her views of sexual permissiveness have changed since the \u201890s, how college students have changed over time, what she learned working at The Strand bookstore, and more.

Read a\xa0full transcript enhanced with helpful links.

Recorded September 26th, 2022

Other ways to connect