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This article relates to Veronica
Mary
Gaitskill is the author of 3
books, and many short stories
and essays (see below for
details). She was born in
Lexington, Kentucky in 1954,
attended the University of
Michigan (where she became a
born-again Christian at age 21,
but lapsed six-months later),
and has lived in Toronto, San
Francisco and Marin County,
California. She married
writer Peter Trachtenberg
in 2001 and
currently lives in New York.
She first tried to get her work
published when she was 23, but
it was not until over a decade
later in 1988 that she succeeded
with the short story
collection, Bad Behavior.
Her fiction typically
focuses on female characters
coping with inner conflicts,
often hitting on "taboo"
subjects such as addiction, sado-masochism
and prostitution (in her
non-fiction she has written of
her own rape - Harper's, "On
Not Being a Victim" -
and of working as both a
stripper and a call girl).
Her stories and essays have
appeared in The New Yorker,
Harper's Magazine, Esquire, The
Best American Short Stories
(1993), and The O. Henry Prize
Stories (1998). The
recipient of a Guggenheim
Fellowship, she teaches creative
writing at Syracuse University
and lives in New York.
Partial Bibliography
Bad Behavior
(1988): The movie,
Secretary (2002) is based on the
short story of the same name in
Bad Behavior, but the screen and
book versions have little in
common. Gaitskill
characterized the film as "the Pretty Woman
version, heavy on the charm (and
a little too nice)"
Two Girls, Fat and
Thin (1991). Follows the lives of Justine Shade (thin) and Dorothy
Never (fat). Justine works through her sadomasochistic issues
while Dorothy works through her up-and-down commitment to the
philosophy of "Definitism".
Because They Wanted To
(collection): Nominated for the
PEN/Faulkner Award in 1998.
Veronica
(2005) was a
National Book Award nominee, as well as a National Book
Critics Circle finalist for 2005. In a 1994 interview, Gaitskill
mentioned she was working on the
novel that became Veronica, but
she later put it aside, only
returning to it in 2001.
This "beyond the book article" relates to Veronica. It originally ran in November 2005 and has been updated for the July 2006 paperback edition. Go to magazine.
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