Because They Wanted To – Mary Gaitskill

Like, the cat’s dead, there’s nothing we can do, so let’s go have our ice cream.” “But it’s normal to care about pets.” “It wasn’t that I didn’t care. I just had a different set of responses than the conventional one.” He sighed and stuck his feet in front of a furnace vent made of metal strips and dark, heat-breathing slits. “Actually I remember getting more upset about Midnight’s brother, Walnut. He was obviously very distraught when he saw her body. He walked around the house for days, looking for her and meowing.

That did seem sad to me. Partly because he didn’t understand what had happened and we couldn’t explain it to him.” He got off the phone feeling okay. But later that night he lay in bed, wide awake and furious at Jacquie. He visited his mother every day during the ten days he stayed in Iowa. He got used to the thin hoop haloing her impaled head.

The tube came out of her mouth, and her eyes began to show expression—usually a dull and cantankerous one. Cards and flowers proliferated in her room. Daniel noticed with irritation that nothing had come from Jacquie. Finally she was able to talk. “How is Jacquie?” she asked. “Pretty good.” “That’s good. She’s a nice girl.” Her voice was devoid of inflection, flat and invulnerable.

There was an undercurrent of grudging bitterness in it, as if she had concluded some time ago that there was no hope for her but was willing to pretend otherwise so that you wouldn’t feel depressed, even though the pretense was a nuisance. Daniel realized with discomfort that she had talked like this for years. His mother’s eyes shifted vaguely around the room. “She is a nice girl,” she repeated.

Her hand began to twitch on the rumpled bedsheet. He put his hand out to still it. It felt like an injured and panicking bird. His hand sweated, and he wondered if it repelled her. No, he thought. Just hold her hand. “Has Harry been to see you?” he asked. Harry was a talkative gynecologist whom she had been dating for the last three months. “Oh, yes. Several times. I think he’s afraid of running into your father.”

“How is he?” “Oh, he’s Harry. He’s incredibly Harry.” She smiled, and her eyes wrinkled elfishly. He saw for a second the pert little girl that smiled at him from old black-and-white photos in the family album. “Tell me about your music,” she said. He told her about his one steady job, in a dark little bar with a crippled neon sign that blinked “Free Crabs—Funk Nite.”

A New York Times Notable Book A man tells a story to a woman sitting beside him on a plane, little suspecting what it reveals about his capacity for cruelty and contempt. A callow runaway girl is stranded in a strange city with another woman’s fractiously needy children. An uncomprehending father helplessly lashes out at the daughter he both loves and resents. In these raw, startling, and incandescently lovely stories, the author of Veronica yields twelve indelible portraits of people struggling with the disparity between what they want and what they know.

Because They Wanted To is further evidence that Gaitskill is one of the fiercest, funniest, and most subversively compassionate writers at work today. 1kitap1.com/en MARY GAITSKILL’s most recent book, Veronica, was nominated for a 2005 National Book Award and was one of The New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2005. She is also the author of the acclaimed novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin and the short story collection Bad Behavior. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories (1993), and The O.

Henry Prize Stories (1998). Her story “Secretary” was the basis for the film of the same name. She lives in New York. MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT SimonandSchuster.com THE SOURCE FOR READING GROUPS COVER IMAGES BY HONI WERNER 1kitap1.com/en Praise for Because They Wanted To “Splendid … Because They Wanted To is too rich to read at a sitting— too many good lines, too much precision about too many complex emotions —yet it’s too compelling not to.”

—David Gates, Newsweek “Gaitskill’s brand of brainy lyricism, of acid shot through with grace, is unlike anyone else’s. And it constitutes some of the most incisive fiction writing around.” —Meghan O’rourke, The New York Times Book Review “An exploration that shows maturity, depth, and dazzling insight.” —Sherri Hallgren, San Francisco Chronicle “Subtle and elegant . . . she sees what’s worth saving in these outsiders lives, and as much as they mourn, these stories are also a jeremiad against the modern world’s assault on the soul.”

—Ann Powers, The Village Voice “It is the essence of Mary Gaitskill’s fiction to acknowledge all the impulses at war in the human heart, and to deliver them to her readers in the form of compelling, evocative art.” —Jessica Treadway, The Boston Globe “Soulful, erotically charged .

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 3ef7be90dd3e4c6b
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 1,449,314 bytes (1.382 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• ISBN: 9780684808567, 9780684841441, 9781439127971, 0684841444
• Pages: 243
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 454.31 minutes
• Total Words: 90,862
• Total Characters: 501,675
• Average Words per Page: 373.92
• Average Characters per Page: 2064.51

Most Frequent Words

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