For our Marginalia web feature, we ask writers to introduce us to one of their favorite works of literature by way of a short piece of prose. This week, Justin Taylor—whose craft essay “The Sentence is a Place to Play: An Argument for Acoustics, Attention, and Ardor” appears in our Winter 2025 issue—dissects a short story by Mary Gaitskill.
The other day a friend and I were marveling over Mary Gaitskill’s short story “Tiny, Smiling Daddy,” which is, among other things, a masterclass in psychology and perspective. I’ve taught the story many times but had not reread the collection from which it comes, Because They Wanted To (1997), in at least a decade. So I did. And I was thrilled to discover something far stranger and more complicated than the broadly “transgressive” (such a ‘90s word) book that it turns out I barely remembered. There is a lot of sex and darkness in these pages, but Gaitskill isn’t going for cheap thrills. The pathbreaking power and vitality of her work flows from the rare intensity of her attention, especially to emotion, as well as a candor so total it feels like an ethical choice as much as an aesthetic one. Here’s a paragraph plucked from a story called “The Blanket”:
His return was a festival of romantic lewdness. At four in the morning, as they lay on the rug in the irradiant caress of the television light, she invited him to sleep with her. At six in the morning, Michael slept like a healthy animal while she lay in a grim ball, tormented by overstimulation. The joy of the previous day seemed unreal, and even if it wasn’t, the outsize quality of it was bound to heighten the desolation she would surely feel when the affair was over. Valerie had not had many good experiences with men in her life, and as the sad sacks and malefactors of the past assembled for her mental review, her excitement over this boy began to seem pathetic. But each time she was about to sink into a restful misery, boisterous optimism surged up and kicked her into wakefulness.
Nine times out of ten, a workshop cohort would (rightly!) criticize a writer for that first sentence, and for the meteorological tracking of Valerie’s inner weather from “The joy of the previous day seemed unreal…” on through to the end of the paragraph. What happened to “Show, don’t tell?” I can hear someone asking. Maybe me. And it’s a question worth answering. What happened is that Gaitskill’s choices have achieved the condition of necessity. Her commitment to her vision is so total and unwavering that all the big and small writerly decisions that give the story its form (plot, syntax, point of view, etc.) feel less like the product of deliberation than the recognition of self-evident truths. That’s an illusion of course, but it’s the one we’re all striving—or ought to be striving—to cast and sustain. When you achieve this condition, as Gaitskill does, the form of the story is its content, every bit as much as Valerie and Michael and their relationship and the bed they (eventually) sleep in. This is why Gaitskill can freely indulge her penchant for flashbacks so protracted they fully subsume a given story’s narrative present. She’s also developing the form she’ll use for her 2005 novel, Veronica, which is somehow even more radical and wrenching today, twenty years on, than when it first appeared.
Like Virginia Woolf, Gaitskill is comfortable with abstraction, and like Carson McCullers (whose Ballad of the Sad Cafe gives the collection its breathless epigraph), she understands feelings and desires not as mere character attributes or plot drivers, but as terrain to be explored: dense forests dotted with hidden glades and caves; dodgy neighborhoods with bustling main drags. She sees the mystery in the crevices, my friend said. That’s exactly right.
And yet, on the page as in life, getting too caught up in your feelings for too long risks boring and repulsing your audience. That’s another good workshop rule, and it goes double when those feelings include shame, alienation, and abjection, all of which I count among Gaitskill’s major subjects. But her icy intelligence, sharp eye, and masterful control of the sentence steer the stories clear of mawkishness. Listen to the short a and e sounds in the phrase “sad sacks and malefactors of the past assembled”—a cool clear vowel music urged along by the consonant s. Ear sharp as a poet’s, hand sure as a surgeon’s, every line a live wire. This is, again, Woolfish, but also Nabokovian, as in “the irradiant caress of the television light.” My favorite sentence is the last one (“a restful misery,” my god!) but it’s the overall effect of deft, electric transmission through thrumming prose that fills me with readerly pleasure and writerly covetousness.