Praise for Mary Gaitskill's story "Today I'm Yours"


Ms. Dion writes: I read the story about the two lesbians and I felt like, I know I'm supposed to be feeling something. This story is supposed to tear at me, gnaw actually at my insides and I'm supposed to want to cry and die simultaneously. But I felt like, I don't care about these horrible people who are too humorless and vain to be believed. I felt like, she's a fucking asshole and you are a dumbass who is such a follower, such a timorous little creature who can only attack people in this hip bourgeois nightmare you've created -- and I haven't got any use for it! Then I thought about my story. My tale of love and woe and longing between an older intellectual alcoholic and a young eager to please shop-girl, of course. Maybe all those compact scenes, the arch dialogue, the precise detail of neckties and mix-tapes and law school and wine drunk handwriting -- maybe everything that I thought was so affecting, was actually only affecting to me. Maybe the last scene, with all the drawn out mawkish, yet restrained, dramarama about the girl driving around in the evening snow and watching the stoplights changing over and over again -- maybe all of that was neither tragic nor hopeful. Maybe it was all a big bunch of bullshit.

Please see the Labels for this post, btw. Cheers.

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