We are eagerly anticipating a visit in April from Mary Gaitskill whose most recent novel, Veronica, was a 2005 National Book Award nominee as well as a National Book Critics Circle finalist. She has also published two short story collections, Bad Behavior and Because They Wanted To, for which she received a 1998 PEN/Faulkner nomination, as well as another novel, Two Girls, Fat and Thin. In 2002 Gaitskill was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction. According to the National Book Award judges, Gaitskill “is an unforgiving writer, harsh, caustic and raw,” and Veronica is “an utterly honest book from someone who understands and evokes the cul-de-sacs of the soul.”
Gaitskill once said that “many articles have chronicled my ‘troubled’ adolescence, the time spent in mental institutions, the fact that I ran away from home at age sixteen and became a stripper, and so on. This background is of limited relevance to my writing except for one thing: my experience of life as essentially unhappy and uncontrollable taught me to examine the way people, including myself, create survival systems and psychologically ‘safe’ places for themselves in unorthodox and sometimes apparently self-defeating ways. These inner worlds, although often unworkable and unattractive in social terms, can have a unique beauty and courage.”
