Mary Gaitskill in 1988.   (Photo: Michael Romanos)

It is also not, strictly speaking, her latest book. Gaitskill wrote the first draft back in 1992, in an attempt to force herself to write faster. Back then, she was living in Manhattan, writing for magazines and shocked by her sudden exposure to pop culture after years of living as a San Francisco bohemian, without a TV or much exposure to the media. (It’s hilarious to hear Gaitskill describe her first sight of MTV and “these weird HBO movies—they’d have people fucking, but with their underwear on,” she says, sounding more than a bit Amish.) “I can be somewhat . . . impressionistically labile,” she explains with a glance downward. “And I can just get drawn into whatever massive enthusiasm is gripping people at the time.”

That enthusiasm was supermodels, a profession that in the early nineties suddenly became “the highest aspiration that anyone could have,” she says. Aiming to capture the seductive swirl of fashion—“both repellent and an itch you couldn’t scratch”—juxtaposed with the AIDS epidemic, she forced herself to produce at the “lightning speed” of 100 pages in nine months. The resulting draft was a mess—scenes were missing or half-written; it seemed impossible to revise. Still, Gaitskill believed it had “a certain emotional urgency . . . If I’d thought it was written by a 22-year-old, I’d be very impressed. If it was written by who I was at the time—a 38-year-old who’d written two published books—I’d think it was unbelievably clumsy and immature.”

She shoved the book aside, slowly completed her second collection of short stories, and then fell into the period that she now calls a “dead zone.” She couldn’t write; she couldn’t finish anything she started. Teaching was part of the problem: The better she became at taking literature apart, the harder it was to create her own. Then her father died in 2001. And for the first time, she was in a happy relationship, with fellow writer Peter Trachtenberg, whom she’d met at a Buddhist retreat; when they got married, she was surprised to discover how much her sense of who she was in the world had altered.

“I wasn’t ever anybody who had a political thing against marriage, but I just thought, Why would I want to do that? So when he proposed, it took me aback.” A few months earlier, she’d mentioned that weddings seemed fun, but that you had to get married to do one. “When he presented me with the ring, he said, ‘I know you don’t want to get married, but maybe we can just have a wedding?’ ”

Trachtenberg asked her to wear the ring while she considered her answer. “It was this,” she said, and held her hand out across the white tablecloth, the diamond sparkling frenetically. “At first I didn’t wear it on the engagement finger, because it didn’t fit; but people still knew what it was, it just had that look about it. And I noticed—and maybe I’m just being hypersensitive about this, but I don’t think so—but you know, I really felt I stood out from other people.”

I just felt like people could identify me: Single. Not young. Middle-aged. And I had these big cat-eye glasses on and bright-red hair, and I felt like I had a big arrow on that said, ‘serial killer here.’

At the time, Gaitskill was living in Rhinebeck, New York, far down a country road without a car. To do errands, she’d walk twenty minutes into town, then stop and buy a solo cookie as a treat. “And I just felt like people could identify me: Single. Not young. Middle-aged. And I had these big cat-eye glasses on and bright red hair and I felt like I had a big arrow on that said, ‘Serial killer here.’

“Then when I started wearing the ring, people at the dry cleaner, the grocery, the cookie place, their eye would fall on the ring and be like, ‘Ahh, she’s okay.’ And on the one hand I really enjoyed that feeling. It was just like—a relief. To feel like I could be part of the herd! And people would say, ‘Congratulations!’ As though I’d won the Nobel Prize. But at the same time, it irritated me, just like, ‘If I wasn’t okay then, I’m not okay now.’ ”

She and Trachtenberg wed the week after 9/11. They’d already postponed the wedding once, when her father died, and didn’t want to do so again. Looking out the window in her wedding dress, she watched her guests arrive from Manhattan, looking “stunned and gray.” “It felt very fraught. I mean, getting married does anyway, but I think a lot of people felt like it could happen again at any time. But—it was good! It sounds ridiculous to say, but it cheered people up.”

In this new frame of mind, she had been thinking again about her abandoned novel, and she had shown the manuscript to her new editor at Pantheon. “I was at such a low ebb and so confused,” Gaitskill said, “that if she had said, ‘Mary, honestly, forget it, it’s not good, just put it in the drawer’—I would’ve done that.” Instead, the editor said the manuscript had potential but needed a framing device: The main character, Alison, could narrate it from the present day.