Mary Gaitskill

EO

Where do you feel that your story begins?

MG

The story of my life or the story generally? A fictional story?

EO

The story of your life as a writer. I just turned 30, and so I’ve been thinking about the moment when I firmly came into consciousness as a thinking, feeling, working person versus when I thought I did. It seems that career-wise, your 30s were a time when things picked up and you were first published. So I’m curious: the narrative that you’ve built around your life, does it still hold? Or alternatively, the narrative that other people built around your life.

MG

The narrative I built, I don’t know. All of that is really being called into question right now, actually. I think that happens when you get to be old. I’ve been conscious of this idea for a while, though, that all people—I don’t think it’s just me—everyone has to build themselves starting from infancy. You start to learn about who you are as an individual being, and how you’re connected to others, hopefully, in your family. You have to build this structure to walk around in, and you do it in response to the world around you. It can’t just happen on its own. You respond to your environment and you build accordingly. Sometimes you build something really fucked up or just something that isn’t best serving who you are. But everyone has to sacrifice something. I hope I’m not being too abstract, but that’s what I’ve been thinking about lately. I’ve been feeling more aware of the ways that I was distorted, or how I thought I was presenting to the world versus how other people saw me. I think this happens to a lot of people.

EO

What specifically was the catalyst, in terms of this thinking?

MG

It’s been more than one thing. In my 40s, when I was writing Veronica, I was really thinking about it a lot: the relationship between the external and the internal, the social world and the chaotic inner world that people have. I don’t know if there was a specific trigger. I think maybe it’s just that I became more relaxed.

EO

What made you more relaxed?

MG

Well, I entered a relationship. Most of my early life was a little bit chaotic, especially when I was a teenager. I wasn’t literally living on the street at any point, but I was living in a crash pad, what people would call squatting. I lived in a lot of those, or in hostels, or different people’s houses. When I was making more consistent money, I shared places with people. Even when I was older, when I went to college and graduated, I had my own apartment, but it was always precarious how I made a living, like it is for a lot of young people. It was a very itinerant life.

When I started publishing, everything changed so rapidly. I had more money and I had this big public identity. Maybe that was the trigger, actually. It was that I suddenly had a public identity, which I hadn’t had before.

EO

I know it took four years or so to eventually sell Bad Behavior in 1987. I’m curious what kept you going, the actual intricacies and details.

MG

It was more like five or six; I started on those stories in my late twenties, in 1981 or 1982.

EO

What drove your desire to be published?

MG

It was something that was very deep in me. I’m sure you’ve read this, I’ve said it before—the first thing I did when I learned how to literally write was write a story. For some reason, stories were always very meaningful to me. And my dreams were like stories to me. I would control my dreams as a kid. I would make them what I wanted them to be. I would stop certain things from happening and make certain things happen whenever possible. Sometimes, the dream was overwhelming and too frightening for me to do that. But when I could, I did.

So, as an adult, even when I got a lot of discouragement, I was really quite driven to do a version of that, make things happen in a story. Maybe because I was so lonely, it was a way of trying to talk to the world. It was something that was nourishing to me and I was good at it, even though I wasn’t getting that feedback yet. But I did get a little bit. I published a couple things in the Village Voice before I published my book, and there were a few tiny things I published in tiny magazines, I don’t even remember their names. Apart from that, it really was the only thing I wanted to do.

EO

I want you to talk more about context. That’s often the thing that’s missing not in your work, but of your work. What was in the air at the time when your first book came out? What was the standard? Culturally, what was happening?

MG

Oh, you mean other people?

EO

Yeah.

MG

Well, Ethan Canin. He’s not a big deal now. But he was one of the stars of the literary scene at that time. He was a young doctor. I think he was still in his 20s. He published a book, the name of which I don’t remember. Emperor of the Air, maybe? I did a reading with him and everybody was there to see him. And then there was Amy Tan. She was also really a big deal. I did a reading with her too. Everybody was there to see her as well. There was Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney too, but really nobody took them seriously.

EO

Why not?

MG

I think they were just seen as trendy and lightweight. People respect Bret Easton Ellis more now.

EO

What was the experience of being on Charlie Rose like for you?

MG

When I was on, it was not for fiction. You probably are aware of an essay I wrote called “On Not Being a Victim: Sex, rape, and the trouble with following rules” because I kept hearing people talk about date rape and sexual stuff in a way that I thought was too generic and binary. Stupid title, I know, but it was my editor’s idea. But anyway, I was on for that. And he hadn’t read it. It is a funny thing to watch. Before I did it, everybody told me, “He’ll try to interrupt you. He talks over people, especially women. He just doesn’t listen.” So I went on there like, “I’m not going to let that happen.” And I fucking ran him over. I was like a machine gun of words. At one point, I said “Why didn’t you ask me anything?” And he said, “Well, I didn’t read it.” He actually didn’t read the essay. [Laughs.]

EO

I’m surprised none of your fiction work landed you a slot on his show.

MG

He probably just thought I was a trendy writer girl, that I wasn’t worth his time. Or maybe he wasn’t aware of me. That’s possible. I mean, certainly, when he interviewed me for that article, he plainly didn’t respect me.

EO

Bret was heavily publicized for Less than Zero and the spectacle of it. But I feel like you guys—your generation of writers—weren’t expected to have longevity. Maybe because your generation was forming the very standards we work towards today. I was surprised that even though Bad Behavior did so well, it still didn’t garner the same attention and press as your male contemporaries. Especially since you’ve remained culturally relevant for the succeeding decades and are widely respected among established and young aspiring writers. Were you writing against what was happening culturally at that time? 

MG

I was not writing against what was happening culturally. I was able to get published because I was part of it. I was accepted. I may not have been respected exactly in the way I would have liked but I was nonetheless part of the conversation.

EO

What was college like for you? Tell me about growing up in Michigan in the late 1970s and ’80s.

MG

I did grow up in Michigan, but not entirely. My family moved around a lot. I was born in Kentucky, but we moved back and forth between the two states for a while. My father taught at a community college in Livonia, outside of Detroit. I didn’t have a high school diploma, so I had to go to community college before enrolling at University of Michigan. I had decided to go to college because I wanted to be a writer. I remember I was sitting in one of these squat places I was talking about. It wasn’t even a crash pad. [Laughs.] This really was a squat. It was an abandoned building that me and some other people were living in, and I was one of the youngest people. It was dirty and gross. And sitting there, I realized my life wasn’t going in a good direction.

I wanted to be a writer, though I didn’t know how to do it. But I was lucky: I could go to school for free for two years at the community college my father taught at. If I hadn’t had that, I don’t know if I would have been able to turn my circumstances around the way I did. School was an important variable. I was able to connect with a teacher there who was really helpful, who gave me individual attention and honed my technical skills a lot. After my two years I was able to transfer my credits to the University of Michigan. I couldn’t have gone anywhere else. I couldn’t afford it. My family couldn’t have paid for it. University, if you’re in-state, is a lot less expensive. I didn’t go to the University of Michigan right away, though…I took some time off because I didn’t generally like school all that much. I went to Canada first and lived in Toronto for a while working as a stripper. And I made some money, I actually saved money for college. It’s almost too much of a cliché to be true, but it happened.

EO

Why Canada?

MG

I’d run away there. I’d lived there before when I was younger. When I was around 16 years old, I went to Canada because it was safer. My cousin had lived in Toronto and she told me it’s better there. Crime rates were lower. In the summer there were cheap hostels all over the country, so I didn’t have to stay in a squat or a crash pad. I could actually go to hostels, which were free or only $5 a night. So, it was a safer place for a teenage girl. My cousin also knew people there that she put me in contact with whom I could stay with from time to time. So that’s why I went there. I liked it, so I stayed for a while. And generally, it was a gentler culture. I don’t know if it still is, but being a stripper in Toronto in the 1970s was just safer. People weren’t allowed to touch you. The bouncers would really protect you. I mean, there were certain rough places that paid more money, but you didn’t have to work there. I did occasionally, but it was a choice.

Canada was just more desirable to me. I even thought I was going to stay there, except I couldn’t go to school—my community college didn’t transfer abroad. So I originally thought, I’ll go back to school at U of M for a year and then I’ll transfer to a Canadian college. But I realized when I went back to Ann Arbor that I liked America better. I was born American. There was an intensity in America that Canada didn’t have. At the same time, Canada is where I grew aware of culture that I wasn’t really paying attention to for much of my teen years.

The cultural stuff, like music and clothes, had been like wallpaper to me. I was really focused on survival and my personal life up to that point. I think I took cultural things for granted. I liked pop music and I liked David Bowie, but I wasn’t thinking analytically about them at all. I became engaged when I started hanging out with a stripper friend of mine. She was into punk, though not a punk herself. She had a very individual style, and she liked Patti Smith’s music and Roxy Music. She read Interview magazine. She also sold heroin, and one of her clients was Pere Ubu, if you know who that is. They were a really good punk band. I would sometimes go with her when she did business, and that kind of interested me. But I didn’t really know what to make of it. She was really into style in a way that I hadn’t seen before. When I went back to Michigan, even though I was an undergrad myself, the other undergrads were completely foreign to me. They were really young, and utterly inexperienced. I mostly spent time with graduate students or people who’d already graduated and were just hanging out. And those people were really into punk stuff.

EO

What else was happening?

MG

I dated somebody who was very stylish and sophisticated, and I almost had an allergic reaction to it. I was like, “This is so pretentious and ridiculous.” But I was also very seduced by it, almost literally; sexually. I wrote an essay about it called “Remain in Light.” They just thought they were so cool and iconoclastic, and they’d put on these parties. Part of their coolness was putting up horrifying posters of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and they had a blow up doll with things written on it like “Fuck me,” “Hurt me,” whatever. They also had a baseball team called “The Serial Killers,” with the names of serial killers on the backs of their jerseys. I thought this was so stupid and annoying, but it was part of that punk ethos at the time. Do you remember when there was a little bit of a scandal around Ralph Northam, the governor of Virginia, and in an old school picture he posed in a KKK costume, or maybe he was in Blackface?

EO

Yes.

MG

People were saying, “How could this happen in the ’80s?” But the ’80s were all about that. Not racist things necessarily but anything that was seen as shocking or iconoclastic was really cool for those people. Ron Asheton of the Stooges wore a Nazi belt, but other than that, I don’t recall seeing anything racist like what Northam did in Ann Arbor. At the same time, I could easily see it happening because the idea of going against a moral norm was a type of coolness. It wasn’t seen as serious. I bet Ralph Northam was telling the truth when he said he didn’t mean it in a ‘serious’ racist way. He probably didn’t. It was just a thing people did. It was subversive, and that’s all that mattered to them. Maybe that was the only point.

Some of it was fun too, I loved the Stooges and Ron Asheton in particular, as a guitar player. Beyond fun, it was expressive of something deep and delicious that had nothing to do with racism or Nazis. It almost made those signifiers ridiculous. Joey Ramone was Jewish and the Ramones had this great song “Today Your Love Tomorrow the World,” a play on Hitler’s slogan “Today Germany Tomorrow the World.” It kind of cut it both ways, but it was mostly joyful and defiant.

Later, when I came to New York, one of the people I knew who worked at the Strand Bookstore was into KKK stuff, she collected memorabilia. She also didn’t consider it serious. At first I didn’t either, but I began to wonder. At one point I said to her, “Why do you like this? Are you seriously into this?” And she said, “Well, I think people don’t understand them. I think they were more about being proud of being White and it’s not about hating Black people at all.” I was like, “But they killed people. They raped people. And tortured people.” It made me wonder if these actions back then weren’t merely about being shocking, though I’m not sure how to describe it. Maybe I’m getting off-subject, but what I’m saying is that was part of the culture then.

EO

I have this theory that people are either publicly sincere and privately ironic, or they’re publicly ironic and privately sincere. And when you say that, I think there’s a sense of irony or playful subversiveness. It’s not to say that I think that the people who aren’t cool try to be publicly ironic, though that’s typically how it works. [Laughs.] I feel like I’m serious publicly and then behind closed doors, I dissociate and I’m actively trying to be a different person and not think about work. Though, how could I know who I am to other people?

MG

I did want to say one more thing about that time of U of M, and my first experience of getting into what you might call ‘punk’ or’ new wave’. That cultural way of being I did on some level find shocking, which is weird, because in a way I was far more experienced than most of these people at college were at the time. I’d been out in the world a lot more and experienced things that they hadn’t experienced. And yet I found their attitude a little bit shocking because it was so trivial. And they didn’t appear to know that. It was kind of a weird thing, and I tried to understand it, because that’s how I’m wired. If something is shocking or frightening to me, I’ll try to understand it. So I immersed myself in it to better understand that sensibility, and accept it in some way. This influenced me a lot, and I started to embrace that “laughing at everything” attitude. Because that’s what it was, making light of everything.

EO

How did this inform your person, this ease and going with the flow?

MG

It had a tremendous influence on my work, especially the early work. If I hadn’t experienced that, if I had met somebody else at college who wasn’t into that…I mean, I don’t know if I ever would have been attracted to a more conservative person, but maybe if I’d been around people who were about literature or something, I might have had a different trajectory, and been more classical or traditional in my approach to stories. Though structurally, I was very traditional in my approach to stories.

EO

Did you expect your first short story collection to sell when it did?

MG

No, I did not expect to be published, I had just about given up. My first agent had basically dropped me and I couldn’t sell anything. When another agent finally called me back, I told him, “Nobody wants it. Everybody hates it.” He told me later he’d thought, “Who is this person?” Fortunately, for me, I was in a better mood when we actually met.

EO

You’ve talked about form and formlessness which made me wonder about your relationship to theory. Where does it live in your world?

MG

Almost none. I never liked that way of talking about literature. I didn’t learn it in school because I was not an English major. I majored in journalism, more because I was worried about making a living than out of actual interest. When I came to New York, I did meet people who would talk that way, though.

EO

How did they speak?

MG

They’d talk about semiotics and the French theorists who were very much in vogue then. I just thought it was boring. I worked at the Strand bookstore for a year or two, so I got a couple of theory books and tried to read them. I was like, “This is awful.” I didn’t care about it; I couldn’t get my head around it. My mind just doesn’t work that way.

EO

How does your mind work? And when did you work at the Strand—was this during the writing of Bad Behavior?

MG

Yes, I was writing those stories when I worked at the Strand. I was there from 1982 to 1983.

EO

In terms of theory and that kind of language, who were your people? Were you hanging out with other people from the literary scene?

MG

No, not at all. I didn’t know any literary people. I didn’t really have “people,” in fact. In the sense of a consistent group, the first people I met when I came to New York were visual artists, painters.

EO

Did your friendships with artists shape your approach to writing?

MG

I don’t think those friendships did. I think it was a coincidence, we were both just drawn to visual things. My first sublet when I moved to New York was with an artist couple; it was the loft of the painters David Humphrey and Emily Cheng. I became friendly with them because I didn’t have a place to stay, and they let me stay there even after my lease ran out. For some reason, I met more artists than writers. I didn’t meet any writers, actually. But I don’t think the painters helped shape my world artistically.

To return to a question you asked earlier—“How does your mind work?” It works tactilely. I don’t seem like a very physical person, but I am. It’s very important for me to orient myself physically in the world. I’ve responded to things visually more than anything else. Music was incredibly influential on my writing. I love the way that music is so powerful and expressive emotionally, in terms of visceral impact. I also love the fine-grained nuance that can happen in the blink of an eye. It can go past your defenses and touch your emotions in ways you can’t understand. It can support and deepen your emotions. When I was younger it could make me cry. It just enters into your system. And you really have to submit to that. It’s more powerful than writing. It’s more powerful than talking. It’s the most powerful art form, I think.

EO

I agree; it’s visual, physical, ephemeral. It triggers all of the senses. I watched an interview where you spoke about visualizing the scenes you write. Your writing, while it resonates, remains intense because of how visceral and visual it is. It’s hard not being in control or being able to negotiate with you as the writer and being made to submit to your world.

MG

Don’t you think that’s how it should be when you’re reading somebody?

EO

Yes, it requires adjusting for me because I’m a person who is theory-pilled. I don’t speak that way and I don’t necessarily want to, but it’s comforting to read because I think very abstractly. With theory, it’s like the writers are giving me colors and I’m able to paint my own way and ask questions. Whereas when I’m reading you, I feel like I’m in a video game and I’m traversing your written world, strapped in.

MG

That’s a big compliment. Thank you. I respond to the world physically more, and that’s why when I write, it’s very important for me to create that visual thing you’re talking about, where you feel like you’re immersed in that world.

EO

It all feels very visual to me. I come from a background of studying art and theory, so I’m thinking about how a curator would activate the material and walk you through a museum and be like, “This is wood. This is made of this material. And it sounds like this when you knock twice. And if you knock three times, it sounds like this other thing.” Even the language that you use is visual, the structure of it feels like a play. It was nice watching the video of you reading This is Pleasure at the Strand because it gave me a better sense of how you write and feel your material.

MG

That’s nice to hear. Bizarrely, for a writer, I never trusted words very much growing up. I always found it hard to express myself in words. In some ways, I’m very fluent with language, but in other ways, I found it hard to express things in words. I think that’s part of why I became good with them; I had to really, really try. Even now, I find words really inadequate.

When I was young, I was very aware—a lot of kids are—of the difference between things people say and what they actually mean. I think that I developed an early propensity to read people’s bodies, tone, and eyes; what they said was secondary. This got amplified when I was young and living on my own in sometimes challenging environments. I developed the ability to read people because I couldn’t always trust their words. Their bodies told me the truth more often.

EO

I had to exercise the same survival tactics growing up. If I had my way, I would be happy to keep to myself. Just exist, without having to exert my will or negotiate it with others.

MG

Would you still want to touch people, be physical with people?

EO

I think so. I feel like I’m inclined to hold a friend or caress their arm because that expresses my comfort and support on an energetic level. So, the physicality in your writing really resonates with me. How did working as a stripper in your adolescence inform your inclination towards the physical? I’d love to know your thoughts about porn, because it was booming around that same time in the ’70s. There were the theaters all around Times Square showing smut films like Deep Throat, Behind the Green Door, and the one Robert De Niro takes Cybil Shepherd to in Taxi Driver. Was your attention turned toward that phenomenon and that industry?

MG

That was definitely happening culturally, but again it was part of the wallpaper. I wasn’t so much interested in porn. I don’t think young people were at that time. We didn’t need it. I was exposed to it sometimes, and I was a little bit curious about it. Most porn looked gross to me, though. I saw some of it besides Deep Throat, but it looked weird. It was still part of my consciousness—among people that I knew at least, you were expected to accept that kind of really intensely sexual way of being. I think coming of age during that time contextualizes the way I look at the MeToo movement.

Younger people now say, “Well, just because people lived their lives that way then doesn’t mean it’s an excuse for them to do it now.” But that flattens things a bit; the context is different for each generation. If you came up during that period of time, it was acceptable to say sexual things to people in certain contexts or to touch people a lot. So there’s some cognitive dissonance: that sort of thing had been okay for most of some people’s lives, so why wouldn’t they think it’s okay now?

Sexual aggression was tolerated more, but there were definitely lines you shouldn’t cross, even then. I mean, it wasn’t okay to rape people or to sexually bully people. But people didn’t have a concept of asking for consent; it was just different. People relied on and trusted bodily cues more, to talk too much would’ve seemed unsexy. I’m sure I was very influenced by that. I remember there was a book, The Failure of the Sexual Revolution, asking if that period of sexual standards was terrible for people. And I think the answer to that question would depend on who you were asking. I think for some people it was terrible but for some people it was good. For me, it was more good because it was a way of expression, and it enabled me to contact the world in a way that I liked because I was so terrible socially. I didn’t know how to be socially, but I understood sex.

EO

I’ve been reading Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison, it’s a collection of lectures that she did in 1992 at Harvard. It’s funny to read her talking about race in a formal way. She wasn't responding to the times, she constructing her own narrative. She’s very cutting, and she’s like, “This is how race operates as a structure in a text,” and so on. She goes on to talk show how thinking about and working with race as material is actually much harder than not thinking about it. It's cool to see her confront the difficulties of race in writing, as a structure, which she does gracefully.

You talking about style is making me think about how one becomes a writer. When you're becoming a writer, you don’t know what you can do style-wise until you do it, and then it either gets accepted and adopted as form or doesn’t. I was curious if that’s what happened to you. Did you knowingly think, “I’m going to write about this in this way because it doesn’t yet exist,” or was it something that you intuitively moved through?

MG

It was intuitive. Practically everything I do as a writer is intuitive. I don’t very often consciously think thematically or socially. With Veronica, I did.

EO

Do you think about structure formally? How do you think about structure?

MG

I don’t know if I do.

EO

So what are you doing? What’s your process?

MG

I’m not sure I have a process anymore, but when I sit down, I’m trying to picture in my mind’s eye, what am I describing? What is this? And then I go through, what does that look like? What does that sound like? What does that feel like? This applies to the thoughts and feelings of characters, to blurred transpersonal states as well as physically based experience. It isn’t even that I ask myself those questions verbally, but that’s what I’m doing on the page. I’m trying to say, “What is this like?” I try to get the words that best describe that. I’m trying to be accurate.

EO

Your storytelling feels like a play. That’s where your writing takes me when you carve out these scenes. As the reader, you’re entering the room, the lights are cast, the room is gray and smoke-filled. It’s a complete and immersive picture. When do you know to trust these images or visions that come to you?

MG

Well, that’s the second part. The revision is more consciously analytical. It’s more like, “Is that really the right word?” But, again, a lot of that’s intuitive. It just feels good, or it doesn’t. But sometimes I ask myself, “Would that character say that? In that moment, would they respond that way?” But how can my writing be a play? Because plays are not interior at all. I don’t know if I could write a play, because a play doesn’t have the interiority that most of my characters are possessing. There’s a lot of attention to their interiors in my writing.

EO

Maybe “cinematic” is a better word to describe it. What I mean is that your visuals are so tightly air-packed, and the interiority completely transports you to the world of the characters. I think visually, and so I can envision each scene so clearly. I think it’s interesting that you say most porn looked gross to you, because you have such a complex vision of sexuality in your writing. I watched the trailer for the movie adaptation of your short story Secretary, featuring Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader, the other day—and then went to watch the trailer again on YouTube where one of the comments was, “I watched Fifty Shades of Grey; it was alright. This movie here, though—after I get old and have Alzheimer’s, this will be what I remember after I’ve forgotten my own name.”

MG

First, I just want to ask you: the person who made that comment about Secretary, could you tell if it was a man or woman?

EO

It’s a woman.

MG

That makes sense to me. I think for some people, the movie is very meaningful, because it speaks to a masochistic sexuality that was suppressed by women of my generation and really beyond. A person’s sexuality is so central to themselves. If a person is embarrassed of their sexuality or feels that it’s bad somehow, and then a movie like that comes along and makes it seem beautiful in some way, it’s going to be really important. So, I can understand it on that level. It’s as if she was somebody who just always felt like there was something horribly wrong with her because she liked that kind of thing, and then this movie comes along and it’s beautiful, loving, and accepting. I can see how that would be incredibly meaningful to her.

EO

I was just rereading a piece of yours in Harper’s from the ’90s and I wrote down this quote, “My early attraction to aggressive boys and men was in part a need to see somebody act out the distorted feelings [I had about the world which] I didn’t know what to do with.” It reminded me of the protagonist’s masochism in Secretary and how we don’t always understand what drives us to make certain decisions. I like that a lot of your essays and short stories introduce that murky territory but ultimately allow the reader to make their own analysis. What prompted you to write that essay? It seems like it foreshadowed a lot of conversations decades down the road about MeToo.

MG

I wrote that essay, “On Not Being a Victim” because the story was either “everybody is being raped” or “these are just a bunch of weak stupid girls crying rape when they were drunk.” I did not recognize this as addressing any human reality. But when I went to pitch the essay, nobody wanted it. Basically, I didn’t know how to pitch a magazine story yet. I would write to editors, and nobody even answered me. I mean, nobody answered me. Finally, I called somebody at Harper’s that I’d known from the past, Michael Pollan. And he had lunch with me, but even he said, “No, nobody wants to hear about this anymore.” I finally just wrote the essay and showed it to someone else at Harper’s who also had lunch with me and miraculously they accepted it. This was huge for me, to finally engage with this world. Then there were women’s magazines. I felt I could engage in a different way there plus make money.

EO

You lived in California in the 1990s. How did that change your writing practice?

MG

I moved to Marin County at a certain point, but I kept my apartment in New York. It was a cheap studio apartment in the West Village. When I moved out, I think it was $400 a month, though when I first moved in, it was around $250. So I held on to that. But I also had a cottage that I lived in in Marin County. I moved there in ’90s, and I spent most of my time there. I gave up the apartment in New York, eventually, because I couldn’t keep both places. I moved to San Francisco, and then I moved to Houston to teach for a couple years. So I wasn’t actually in New York for most of the ’90s. I was in San Francisco for a lot of it. I actually kind of loved the ’90s.

EO

Let’s talk about it. What happened?

MG

For the first time I began to feel like I understood the culture around me. Before that I felt like I was stumbling through it. And I also didn’t have much contact with what most people call culture. For most of the ’80s, I didn’t own a television. I didn’t read magazines, except if I was in a doctor’s office and picked one up, or if I saw something interesting on a cover then I occasionally would buy one, but mostly I didn’t engage. I listened to a radio, that was it. I was really just concerned with what was immediately around me again in that physical sense. I was really like most people at that time—I would go to parties, I was interested in making friends with people to have sex with, frankly, those looking for a partner of some kind. I would hear people talk about politics or world events at parties and I would try to follow it. I would hear the news on the radio, I would walk by a newsstand and see headlines, but mostly it was incomprehensible to me. I think I realized that for me to really understand it I would have to follow it in much more depth than I wanted at that time.

EO

On this thread, I interviewed Bret, and he’s from LA, and so am I. I know the world that he’s from, though it’s obviously of different times. My theory why Less than Zero has reached so many people is because it’s literally about a small village. I think that’s what so many people overlook, because they don’t have that context, and I think that your writing kind of does a similar thing. Your writing is so this, our exchange, it’s just me and you. It’s not about the world and that’s more what I mean where it feels like dancing, or it feels like dialogue. You’re not trying to relate to everybody, which is why I think it reaches everybody.

MG

I really love the way you read my work, I have to say. You read it the way I actually write it. But going back to the ’90s: at that time, I felt like I had more room to look outside of that more closed-in frame and actually look at what culture was doing. I was aware of it. The ’80s had an impact on me, but it was more local. I didn’t see in terms of “We are this” or “We are that.” That kind of cultural analysis was very foreign to me. I remember hearing a lot in the ’80s about Lady Di, Diana Spencer, and I just didn’t get it. I was like, “Why am I supposed to care about this woman?” When I watched The Crown I felt sorry for her. I did. But in the moment I remember being so baffled by that, all the grief.

EO

Tell me more.

MG

I just didn’t understand it. She was a foreigner, she was a royal; the idea of royalty didn’t make any sense to me. It seemed utterly archaic. She’s not from the United States, it doesn’t apply to us. She’s pretty, but she’s not that pretty. She’s nice, but a lot of people are nice. And why is her life a tragedy? She’s rich! There’s so many worse things. But I did get it when I watched The Crown.

EO

I mean, I love The Crown. I just love the story. Even if the show is exaggerated, it pays such great attention to detail. The world that they built, the wardrobe, the show’s vernacular—all of it is captivating to me.

MG

It helped me understand the Lady Di drama, too. As she was depicted in that show, she was somebody who got involved in this world that she didn’t fully comprehend, but it was glamorous to her and it was the most powerful thing in her frame of reference. It was the biggest thing. And she herself had a power, too, that she didn’t know she possessed.

EO

I’m actually so interested in understanding power. That’s one of the things that being from Los Angeles has made me more attuned to—witnessing money, social currency, and narrative as a form of power, that is, or actually inventing yourself. I don’t think that she understood the weight of the royal family’s power—she was too young to fully get the picture. Once she realized that she had power by association, she learned that she could harness it to leverage her interests, her ethics, and counter a narrative the rest of the royal family was purportedly spinning about her. Then there was a rebirth that we witnessed. When she obtained that superstardom, she became so foreign to herself and it kind of just spun out of control—ouroboros vibes.

MG

And it destroyed her. And that’s very dramatic. I can see why that was really compelling to people. If her inner world was really the way the show portrayed it, Diana was quite naive. She believed in this family so completely—the way they had been presented—and she wanted to be part of it. But it was something she didn’t actually understand and she had to do a lot of violence to herself to fit into it.

When she started to appear in public, she had a charisma that she didn’t know that she had. And it was on one hand very powerful, but on the other hand, it was a double-edged sword because she didn’t know how to manage it. It wound up being incredibly destructive to her. She tried to lend it to Prince Charles, and then she did that disastrous play that she thought he would like, and he hated it because she was showing so much power that in his mind was utterly inappropriate. It was like she couldn’t grasp it. It’s very dangerous to have power if you don’t understand it and don’t know how to use it. It can kill you. That was really interesting to me. And then she couldn’t escape. She couldn’t get out. This man appeared who she thought could help her, and he was powerful too, but it just didn’t work at all. It just drew down all this craziness onto them and killed them, killed both of them.

EO

She’s similar to some of your characters, Diana, in that she possesses a sense of loneliness and dissonance in comparison to others who are able to move more fluently through their narrative world. Was magazine writing very different for you from the writing you had been doing?

MG

I felt I could engage in a different way there and also make good money. It was women’s magazines at the time that were going through a vogue of wanting to have fiction writers write for them. It was mostly about makeup and hair, and being fat or not fat. The most trivial things, but I could engage with deeper stuff, too: the culture of beauty and the need for it is pretty deep. It was great to engage with those topics—which were enormous then—and make money at the same time.

EO

Why were those topics particularly in vogue during the ’90s?

MG

Because suddenly everybody wanted to be beautiful. The supermodel phenomenon was suddenly the most important thing in the world, which astonished me. That’s a very complicated subject for me; you’ve probably read some of the things I’ve said about it, or maybe you haven’t. But it was this huge, intimidating thing.

Beauty was always important. Girls had always wanted to be beautiful, but there was more freedom to be an individual previously. Before this moment came crashing down, you didn’t have to look exactly like a fashion model, and suddenly you were supposed to look exactly like one. I became insecure about my looks in a way that was even deeper than I’d ever been before, because I wasn’t tall. I’m not tall. I don’t look like a model and I was like, “I’m supposed to look like that. I have to look like that or else.” It seemed so violent to me and yet so seductive. Violent in that it was an insistence on you having to be like this, but it was also so powerful and compelling: this cutting knife that wanted everything removed but this one thing to be seductive. I thought it was demonic, almost.

EO

Sex-selling.

MG

It was so about money and I knew that, but still it affected me. I watched MTV; I was very charmed by that. But there, too, models were everywhere. It was really awful, but it was also dizzying. In San Francisco, people would really play with that. People would mock it and dress in a way that mocked it, but at the same time they wanted to create their own beauty. That was even more powerful. In a way, I loved that intense, visual sexual way of being in the world that was similar to yet distinct from what I’d seen in New York in the ’80s. San Francisco beauty had a greater relationship to culture en masse: it was bigger, louder, less secret than New York. It was this public, vivid fever dream that was very compelling to me and which I felt I could relate to.

That approach to beauty and fashion existed in New York, too, but on a smaller scale; it was less widespread. I felt so small in New York when I was part of that. I had to rely on being a pretty girl to the extent that I was, and I never said anything. I just watched and listened and tried to understand.

EO

What kinds of things were you doing while you were writing in New York? Were you mainly quiet, staying to yourself, just writing in cafés around town?

MG

I didn’t even go to cafés. I stayed in my apartment. I wrote on my bed.

EO

Did you go out on the town from time to time?

MG

Hardly. I mean, a little bit—there was downtown stuff. There were readings and there was a place called the Nuyorican Poets Café in the East Village. I went there sometimes to hear music. I was a little on the outskirts of the jazz scene. There was a jazz scene still in the Village Vanguard, but also in these much smaller places in the East Village. This is because I had a boyfriend who was a jazz drummer. He played with people, and I would sometimes go to hear them, and I liked that world. It was very unintimidating. It was very low-key and nice. Once I broke up with him, I didn’t return to it. One of the first articles I wrote for the Village Voice was about that downtown jazz scene.

The cultural things I liked the most were music and dance. I would sometimes pay for expensive tickets to see dance performances. I love Merce Cunningham, Alvin Ailey, Trisha Brown. I remember I saw The Rite of Spring by Martha Graham. I would sometimes see ballet. I would go see these things by myself because I enjoyed them so much. Then I would go see performances that people would just do in these tiny venues, just weird stuff that was funny. I had a friend who I sometimes went with to Area, this big nightclub.

EO

Yes, Area’s founders Eric and Christopher Goode’s coffee table book is a masterclass in conceptual art making and convening people—contemporary “creative direction.” [Laughs.]

MG

I remember going to The Pyramid Club and seeing some fun things there. Also the Ridiculous Theater. I didn’t go out much but I covered the territory. Milk Bar, Save the Robots, The World, et cetera. I would also go to art galleries sometimes. I had artist friends who did little openings in the East Village galleries. Nobody expected me to participate or say anything intelligent and I didn’t! But when I became a known writer, people suddenly expected me to say intelligent things and it was too much for me. So that’s why I went to Marin County. I just wanted to be by myself.

EO

Is that something that you’ve continued to do since?

MG

Isolating myself like that?

EO

Yeah.

MG

No, I began to get lonely there when I gave up my apartment in New York and I broke up with a boyfriend. I did have a girlfriend for a while in San Francisco but then I was alone in Marin County and it was just too much isolation and I had to move to San Francisco. I consciously decided I can’t be isolated, I have to be part of the world.

EO

What was it like reemerging into the world? And you were still writing through this period?

MG

It was incredibly awkward. And I was working on Veronica, actually. But also the stories that wound up being in Because They Wanted To.

EO

How old were you moved to San Francisco?

MG

Pretty old. I think I was 38 or 39. But I realized I’ve got to be part of things, I have to figure out a way to be immersed in that local way again. I remember once going out to a café in San Francisco where you could just sit with other people at communal tables. There was a guy sitting next to me and he was alone and I was sitting there and thinking, “Should I start a conversation with him? How do I do that?” I almost said something to this guy but I didn’t, thank god. I nearly said, “I’ve been living alone for a really long time and I don’t really know how to talk to people. Could we just have a conversation?” And I just thought how fucking weird it would have been if I’d said that.

EO

That’s amazing. Some of my artist friends will say, “When you’re the most honest or vulnerable, that’s when people don’t believe you.”

MG

I know. I’ve even noticed this when I teach writing that sometimes a student will write something and there’ll be something—everybody, including me—will say, “This is completely unbelievable.” And the student will inevitably say, “But that’s what happened.” [Laughs.] And I believe them. I don’t think they’re lying, and usually it’s that they’ve written it in a way that isn’t good or convincing. Or just lacking enough context. That’s why people don’t believe it, but it’s true.