Mary Gaitskill on Damage and Defiance - The New Yorker

In your story “Something Familiar,” a woman returns to New York City, after decades in California, and has an unusual conversation with the driver of her cab from the airport, which pulls up memories from her past. How did the setup for the story come to you?

It was purely intuitive. I had the idea for the story but didn’t know how to enter into it. I literally went to bed thinking, Great story, but how to enter into it? The next morning, I thought of a chance encounter on a taxi ride. Possibly, I was subliminally influenced by a faint memory of the movie “Taxi Driver”? It’s been a long time since I’ve seen it, but it’s possible.

Both of the characters have had difficult times in their lives, and both have achieved a level of stability that may have been hard to imagine when they were younger. When the woman was young and trying to make it as a magazine writer, she and her best friend sometimes resorted to prostitution in order to pay rent. Her feelings about it at the time are more lighthearted than one would expect: “It seemed of a piece with the pleasing artifice of clubs and magazines, an almost comical piece, more real and more absurd than dating.” Does she still see it the same way from late middle age?

Basically, yes. (Though there would also be a layer of bewilderment that she voices to herself: What were we even doing there?) It may seem a strange attitude, but that would really depend on what her dating life was like! At one point, she thinks that it was “safer, actually, on an emotional level; none of the men she met there could really hurt her.” That is quite a revealing statement.

She felt that choosing that path was an act of defiance and feminine strength—that she was able to take what she’d been told “was the most shameful and despised thing” and make something beautiful out of it. But was she unusual in not having been coerced into that situation, in being able to choose if and when she wanted to do this, in being able to quit when she decided to?

I don’t know how unusual she is in being able to choose. I doubt there is any data on that. Certainly, a lot of women are coerced, and also there’s a more subtle thing that can happen, where someone might go into it thinking it’s temporary and get drawn in deeper than she intended. But I do think that a lot of women were/are like my character, especially in a city like New York, which is so expensive and so anonymous and, at least in the eighties, so hypersexual and open to whatever. She has an advantage in that there’s something else she may succeed at and eventually does; if she hadn’t, the outcome might have been different.

But, to address the “defiance” idea, I don’t think that is the reason she does it; she really is compelled by economic need, albeit sporadically so. She can’t pay her rent with what she’s making as an editorial assistant (this is realistic, or was in the eighties), and she’s been fired from a long list of part-time jobs. The element of defiance adds a certain semi-appealing flavor to the choice. It’s hard to describe exactly what I mean by this. I even hesitated to include those thoughts in the story, because they are shorthand for something pretty complicated and deep, even if the character expresses it in a way that sounds trivial. I remember this feeling being very much in the air in the eighties—not in relation to prostitution, in particular, but when it came to rejecting, or at least disrespecting, the received ideas about sexual morality. It would have been very natural for a generation coming of age during the Playboy (magazine) era to question society’s view of prostitution. My father was a very, very straitlaced person, and yet he had a subscription to that magazine, in which prostitutes were regularly portrayed as (1) stupid and degraded; (2) beautiful and adored; and (3) desirable in either case. This is a very confusing message for a girl to absorb, and one that was reflected in other aspects of culture, too, if less starkly. It was a contradiction that lent itself to a kind of romance and curiosity: Why are these women so desired yet so despised, so powerful yet polluted and pitiable? How are they different from other women? Or are they? You can see that fascination and romance in the prostitute characters of Dostoyevsky, Dickens, and Zola, not to mention countless fifties paperback potboilers. (My dad had tons of those, too.) Even in the Bible, whores show up as ambivalent figures. So, yeah, my character would have absorbed all of that.

The driver has been violent toward women in the past and has regrets about that. The woman regrets having hurt the feelings of a john who wanted to ask her out. They both seem more haunted by the damage they’ve done to others than they are by their own damage. Why do you think that is? Is it survivor’s guilt?

She’s focussed on this memory because it has naturally come up: the taxi-driver reminds her of a very dramatic instance in which an action of hers had consequences for others. She considers her effect on the man to have been deeper than what we usually mean by “hurt feelings”—she takes it seriously, precisely because of her own experience of damage. If her driver that night had reminded her of someone who had hurt her, she would likely have had a lot of feelings about that as well. As for the driver, I think he is haunted by damage to himself: he’s still hurt that his dad called him Lumpy McFatface! He feels ill-treated by his wife and his son, and by women generally, as his dream shows. He basically feels unloved, and perhaps he actually is. However, he’s also, in some murky way, aware that the damage he’s inflicted—abusing his wife, emotionally injuring his son, terrorizing a random woman—is much worse than what was done to him. He feels it so painfully that he can tolerate real remorse only in connection with his dreams. Also, both characters are well into the second half of their lives. I think it’s natural at that point to reckon with your own regrets.

Almost the entire story takes place during the late-night cab ride. Is there something about travel—the suspension between places—that allows the characters’ unusually intimate conversation to happen?

Yes, definitely. Travel can create a brief space where normal social constraints are suspended and people will speak more deeply to strangers than they would to people they know. I’ve had unusual conversations with people during taxi rides or on trains and planes—though this was more likely to happen in the past. Now people are staring at screens or talking on their phones.

The first two-thirds or so of the story are told from the woman’s perspective. For the last third, we alternate between her thoughts and the driver’s. Why did you decide to make that leap into his mind? Was one of the characters easier to inhabit than the other?

I really had to transition to him. The story would not have had enough meaning without his point of view. She was naturally easier for me, because she’s closer to me in age, gender, and experience. Still, I felt I could be with him in a basic human way; he’s a human struggling with emotional pain. Mostly, I was worried about condescending to him. I really hope I didn’t. ♦

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