I went to visit Mary Gaitskill on a pleasant October day in the comfortable, chalet-like home she shares with her husband, also a writer, on the campus of Bard College (though neither of them teaches there).

She had recently submitted to her publisher her latest story collection, Don’t Cry, her fifth book in twenty years. Her first, Bad Behavior, was a story collection, published when she was thirty-three. This was followed three years later by the novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin, then the story collection Because They Wanted To, and, eight years later, in 2005, the novel Veronica, about a former fashion model, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.