Mary Gaitskill

I now read Mary Gaitskill stories when I can't sleep.

She's obviously a woman who stays awake way beyond midnight and gets her subject matter there.

Mary's stories are almost too real, too much like things that really happen, in the way not sleeping is more real to you when all you want to do is sleep.

Mary's very good at showing me what men look like to women, and how what women see in men make men who they really are.

In the Museo Archeological Nazionale di Napoli, that great museum of the classical world, there are images upon images of women who look like men and men who look like women. When I looked at their faces, when I looked into their eyes, I couldn't tell the difference.

Seeing so many of them, some of which are thought to have been mosaics or frescoes on the floors or the walls of the wealthy in Pompeii and Herculaneum, led me to think about about how far apart men and women may have grown in the thousands of years since antiquity, at least in terms of how they each see the world. What forces, pressures, conditions created the situation of each, where each seem so separate now as to be different species?

The question kept me awake past 4 a.m., a pure night/thought that used the past as its backdrop while reading yet another story by Mary Gaitskill.