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Mary Gaitskill on KCRW’s Bookworm today

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Mary Gaitskill talks to Michael Silverblatt today on KCRW’s Bookworm at 2:30 p.m. Pacific. Her latest book, ‘Don’t Cry,’ is a collection of short stories that, our reviewer Irina Reyn writes, ‘address unflinchingly the conflict between our actions and desires, our losses during war and peacetime, the charged dynamics between men and women.’

When distilled to its essence, Gaitskill’s fiction is the literary equivalent of scratch marks from raking nails -- lingering, throbbing, trailing blood. ‘Sometimes, things that look really ugly on the outside look different when you get up close,’ the protagonist in ‘An Old Virgin’ tells herself. To probe that observation from all angles is Gaitskill’s creative mission. In ‘Don’t Cry’ she stares down human pain more directly than ever before.
The title story is, Reyn says, the most emotionally wrenching. It’s tantalizingly excerpted at KCRW. It begins:

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Our first day in Addis Ababa we woke up to wedding music playing outside the hotel. We had traveled for 20 hours and we were deeply asleep. The music entered my sleep in the form of moving lights, like fireflies or animate laughter, in a pattern, but a loose and playful one.

But things are bound to get worse. Because she’s considering more than just fireflies. In February, she told the Believer:

We have all of this life force pouring through us — as does everything alive, animals, insects — yet it must take this very specific form of a personality, a body that looks a certain way and that functions a certain way. Our eyes and our mouths and our noses are so particularly formed. Human beings look so different from each other, voices are so different, everything about us is so individual, and that’s so exciting and juicy and appealing, and we’re attached to these things and they’re so fascinating and beautiful — I don’t just mean model-beautiful, but all the individual forms that people can take.

And yet in another way, we’re going to fall apart, kind of dissolve back into this vast soup from whence we came, whatever that is. It’s almost like these beings pop out of this massive sludge and then they get sucked back into it, and that’s a really hard thing to comprehend.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

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