The Devil's Treasure: A Book of Stories and Dreams by Mary Gaitskill

Author:Mary Gaitskill
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781733540155
Publisher: ZE Books
Published: 2021-10-18T21:00:00+00:00

When Two Girls was published, a reporter from the Lexington Herald-Leader in Kentucky called my father and asked him about his feelings regarding what I’d written, specifically what I’d written about the father who raped his daughter. Was he, my father, worried about what people would think? My father asked the reporter, “Do you know who Edgar Rice Burroughs is?” The reporter answered, “Wasn’t he the one who wrote the Tarzan books?” “Yes,” said my father. “That’s right. Do you think Edgar Rice Burroughs was raised by apes?” I am not surprised that this wonderful exchange did not make it into the paper; it was too wonderful for the paper. It still makes me smile to think about it. The wonderfulness of it may’ve been made possible by the fact that my father never read Two Girls; he never read anything I wrote except maybe one or two stories. But still, the attitude is wonderful.

Some years ago I got an email from a former roommate from my college years. She said she had loved Veronica, particularly the way I wrote about my father. In truth the father in Veronica isn’t my father, nor is the mother my mother. They share some of the same DNA, but they are not representatives of the actual people, any more than the parents in Two Girls are actual representations; I told my friend that. After that exchange, she apparently read more of my work, because she wrote me another email shortly after the first one, this time ironically very angry to have recognized that I’d based a character in a story on her. (And in this case, the character was based more closely on her than the characters in Veronica or Two Girls had been based on my parents.) I’m sure it did not matter to her when I said that I did not mean the portrait to be an unflattering one, and that in fact many people found the character touching. I’m sure it mattered less when I explained that, while my memory of her had been the clay that built the image of that character, in my mind the image was not literally an image of her, the real person. I’m guessing that sounded like fanciness to her. But I was sincere. I have had characters based on me too, and I didn’t like it. So I understood. If I had known where to find my former roommate when I wrote the story, it’s possible I would’ve shared it with her first. But I hadn’t seen or heard from her in decades; she had found me through the website of a university at which I had taught, but I would not have known where to find her, especially since she had legally changed her name. She had been important to me; the story was important to me too. And in my mind the story and the woman were very separate.

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