Influenced By

A Survey of Writers on Contemporary Writers

Listening to writers read and discuss their work at Newtonville Books, the bookstore my wife and I own outside Boston, I began to wonder which living, contemporary writers held the most influence over their work.  This survey is not meant to be comprehensive, but is the result of my posing the question to as many writers as I could ask.  

—Jaime Clarke

MARY GAITSKILL

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ALICIA ERIAN: In college, my friend lent me her copy of Mary Gaitskill’s first book, a collection of stories entitled Bad Behavior, and said I should read it. What exactly that should meant wasn’t clear, but my friend was one of the best dressers I’d ever known, and this caused me to take her literary recommendations very seriously.

I connected with the disconnected misery of Gaitskill’s characters. They depressed the hell out of me, but they never bored me. I always needed to know what was going to happen to them. They mirrored my own emptiness, and from this I inferred that I had a shot at being interesting as a person, too. 

Most especially, I connected with the story “Secretary.” It made me incredibly horny, and incredibly ashamed of being horny, since what was making me horny wasn’t something that was good for the main character, whose boss was sexually abusing her. At the same time, as a wannabe writer, I was aware that what Gaitskill had accomplished in terms of eliciting these conflicting responses from me was the apex of literary success. Gaitskill had revealed to me who I was—my basest instincts—before I’d even understood such things myself. I didn’t know her, but somehow, she really, really knew me. I hoped to offer the same experience to another reader one day.

ELLIOTT HOLT: I was in college—this was nearly twenty years ago—when I read Mary Gaitskill’s story, “A Romantic Weekend.” Everything about it was a revelation: the deadpan title; the cool, unsentimental tone; the confident shifts in perspective; the taut sentences. The subject matter was revelatory, too: I had never read a story about sadomasochism before. In fact, I had never before read something so unsparing in its description of “romance” and desire. “A Romantic Weekend” is a story about disappointment, mostly: the man is a sadist and discovers, in their weekend away, that his new lover is not the true masochist that he thought she was. They are not sexually compatible. But once they let go of their rigid definitions and ideas of one another, they actually connect—briefly (we know it won’t last)—as human beings. Gaitskill’s sharp descriptions are unforgettable: “In the big coat he looked like the young pet...