Category Archives: Mary Gaitskill

‘A certain pleasant darkness’: what makes a good fictional sex scene?

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The novelist Niamh Campbell on why describing intimacy is so difficult and how creative writing about sexuality is changing. Plus, she picks 10 of her favourite examples

One of my favourite literary sex scenes is a swift and quiet one. In Colm Tóibín’s The Pearl Fishers, a gay man having dinner with a former lover and this lover’s – fanatically Catholic – wife thinks, with a flash of candidness, of anilingus past. It doesn’t read like a calculated shock, just pleasure; the story moves on and the image melts out. No point is made, nobody humiliated, no corny gotcha! occurs. There are only three people: one deceiving (husband), one pious (wife) and one emboldened but alone. The point is nuanced humanity. It’s hot.

It has been remarked upon that recent writing about sex by, in the main, young women tends towards the squalid, abject and confrontational. I can tell you that this partly down to the fact that app-based erotic culture in the metropolises of late capitalism really can be squalid, abject and confrontational. If people’s lives become miserable mills of boredom and humiliation they will tend to take it out on one another. I know this because I am Irish. People think this country was deranged for most of the 20th century by the church, but it was also deranged by poverty and, relatedly, shame. #NotallIrish of course; some people belonged to a more sex-positive cosmopolitan elite class, some were able to smuggle in condoms. And yet, the fact that it still feels impossible to discuss sex and Ireland without mentioning penitentiary laundries says a lot.

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Cat Person author Kristen Roupenian on the trouble with writing about sex

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Mary Gaitskill’s collection Bad Behaviour has defined her career. Will a new generation of female writers be stereotyped in the same way?

In 2017, “Cat Person”, the first short story I’d ever published, went viral. In the story, a college student named Margot goes on a long, disastrous date with a man in his mid-30s named Robert. At the end of the night, Margot sleeps with Robert, despite realising, belatedly, that she has no desire to do so. Her reasons for making that choice remain opaque even to her, and she ghosts him the next day. To my surprise – and, I think, to my editor’s – the story became a catalyst for dozens of overlapping conversations about sex, consent, online dating and #MeToo.

Amid the waves of often contradictory praise, judgment and analysis of “Cat Person”, an occasional comparison surfaced, that I clung to like a lifeline: the work of Mary Gaitskill. When people brought up her name in conjunction with mine, I felt both relieved and grateful. Partly this was because I genuinely loved her writing, but it also had to do with a story I had in my head about her career: she was a female writer who had first come to prominence because of stories that featured explicit sex. She had weathered the onslaught of prurient attention – not just to her writing, but to her life and her looks – that had come along with that. But she had emerged on the other side of that maelstrom as a writer who had achieved near-universal critical acclaim. I understood these early comparisons as the compliment they were almost certainly intended to be: a suggestion that I was not just a woman writing narcissistically about her own sex life and veiling it under a thin gauze of fiction; I was a woman writing narcissistically about her own sex life, veiling it under a thin gauze of fiction, and then, through some magic, turning it into art.

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