Because They Wanted to: Stories [Paperback]

Mary Gaitskill (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 27, 1998

A New York Times Notable Book

A man tells a story to a woman sitting beside him on a plane, little suspecting what it reveals about his capacity for cruelty and contempt. A callow runaway girl is stranded in a strange city with another woman’s fractiously needy children. An uncomprehending father helplessly lashes out at the daughter he both loves and resents. In these raw, startling, and incandescently lovely stories, the author of Veronica yields twelve indelible portraits of people struggling with the disparity between what they want and what they know. Because They Wanted To is further evidence that Gaitskill is one of the fiercest, funniest, and most subversively compassionate writers at work today.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Reading a Mary Gaitskill short story is like getting into a no-holds-barred fight: mean, raw, and dangerous. She's fond of portraying characters who seem strangely comfortable living in emotional extremity. She never takes the safe route through a story; in fact, she'll choose the low road every time. The title story places a runaway girl in care of abandoned children. Where many writers would seek out some faint ray of redemption or hope, Gaitskill concentrates on the grime in the cracks of the linoleum. In "The Girl on the Plane," a bitter man confesses his participation in a brutal act to a stranger, but the confession brings no solace. These stories practically shake with tension. In the final long story of this collection, "The Wrong Thing," Gaitskill picks up the tale after the breaking point, as she gracefully illuminates the life of a woman piecing together the fragments of her sexual and emotional history. Because They Wanted not only fulfills the promise of her previous short-story collection Bad Behavior and the novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin, it takes us to a higher place. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

In "The Dentist," a story about a magazine writer's sexual infatuation with her bland, middle-aged dentist, a billboard for Obsession perfume looms over the protagonist's neighborhood, projecting a "strange arrested sensuality of unsatisfied want." Like that billboard, the nine stories in Gaitskill's third book (after the novel, Two Girls, Fat and Thin) hold a mirror up to a 30-something zeitgeist of emotional dysfunction, chronicling people paralyzed by unappeasable desires and trapped by abusive families and relationships. The landscape is a familiar one?of support groups and public health clinics, funky neighborhoods in the Pacific Northwest and lower Manhattan inhabited by writers, musicians and sex workers. With her crisp prose and withering eye for detail, Gaitskill invests these scenes with psychological vividness and desolate poignancy. The title story is a portrait of a resilient 16-year-old who runs away from home in the wake of her parent's divorce and takes a job in Vancouver babysitting for a financially desperate mother of three. The disgruntled protagonist of the opening story, "Tiny, Smiling Daddy," disturbed that his estranged lesbian daughter has published a self-help essay about him in a national magazine, ponders the divide between parents and children. In the four-part final story, "The Wrong Thing," a 39-year-old poetry teacher tries to remain stoic in the face of a series of erotic but loveless flings. It's telling that Gaitskill's title is an unfinished sentence, for the theme that binds these stories together is an emotional modality shared by a cast of unhappy people, whose sordid fantasy lives and small gestures of compassion allow them to keep at bay the meaninglessness and despair of the everyday.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; 1st Scribner Paperback Fiction Ed edition (February 27, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684841444
• ISBN-13: 978-0684841441
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (50 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #181,094 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Incredible collection, but not for everyone, May 7, 2000

By 

Steve S. (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Because They Wanted to: Stories (Paperback)

I've been a short story fan since I was a teen, had a love-hate relationship with the New Yorker ever since. Too many short stories follow that formula--middle class protaganists, emphasis on interior life rather than plot, conflict deriving from relationships, with the epiphany arriving right on schedule in the last 2 pages. Updike and Munro do this really well. Even though Mary Gaitskill's collection follows some of these rules, I found it breathtakingly original and powerful. She pushes the interiority of her characters to an extreme, and I'd have to say the single trait of these stories I admire most is their ability to make you feel what her characters do. Forget plot, for the most part--the value here is in the subtle observations of love and sexuality. These stories have an edge unknown to your average buttoned-down New Yorker writer--only Thom Jones at his best can surpass her there. With Gaitskill, Jones and Junot Diaz, we're finally starting to get some short story writers who don't seem to have spent their lives hiding in the suburbs. Don't read this book in a hurry--savor it.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Cerebral Salad of Souls (sorry!), August 29, 2002

By 

momwith2kids (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Because They Wanted to: Stories (Paperback)

I loved this book! It?s a collection of short stories about men and women of all ages (mostly in their 30s though). Gaitskill has a beautiful style of writing. Her descriptions are wonderfully unique and filled with imagery. All of the relationships she portrays are fascinating because all of her characters are damaged in one way or another.

Some of my favorite stories (almost all of them, really) were Tiny Smiling Daddy, about the father who recalls and regrets his reaction to learning of his daughter's "coming out." Because They Wanted To, was about Elise, a 16 year-old runaway who takes care of a stranger's kids. Orchid, about old friends seeing each other after so many years, thus stirring up memories of a close friendship bordering on love. The Blanket, about a relationship between an older woman and a younger man. Finally there's one of my favorites, Girl on a Plane, where a man looks back on his misdeeds after meeting a woman who mysteriously reminds him of a girl he once knew. Then there's The Dentist, where a girl named Jill endlessly chases this man whom the author gives no name (which clues you into his personality!). In the last four stories, the narration changes to the first person and takes on a much more lively pace. However, that does not take away the depth of the all of the preceding stories.

Gaitskill is flawless at exposing the complexities of the human psyche. Furthermore, she exposes the maddening efforts people make to connect with one another. Illustrating every character as a unique individual, Gaitskill gives each person his or her own set of baggage, idiosyncrasies, and methods of survival. Instead of simple love stories where boy meets girl--boy and girl fall in love--they live happily ever after, here's a a collection of relationships, each with their own harrowing progressions, ups and downs, and a million different paths of resolution, not all necessarily "happy." As an amateur writer, I'm inspired by her work and each story teaches me something new.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stunning Stories!, April 10, 2005

By 

Katrina Denza "KatDenza" (NC, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Because They Wanted to: Stories (Paperback)

Mary Gaitskill's second story collection, "Because They Wanted To," seemed to me just as fresh as her first, with a quieter, deeper reflection on the human condition and dazzling gems of insight imbedded in its rich foundation. Each of the twelve stories (eight stories and four connected stories within a novella) is a tale of unrequited love in varying forms and degrees. In "Tiny, Smiling Daddy," a father discovers his lesbian daughter has published an article about their relationship; in "Because They Wanted To," a destitute runaway agrees to baby sit a stranger's three children for an afternoon while the woman hunts for a job, and reflects on the past that drove her to Canada; and in "The Girl on the Plane," a man is seated next to a woman that reminds him of a woman he once gang-raped and when confronted with the brutality of the act, desperately searches for ways in which he could excuse or explain his behavior. I most admire Gaitskill's incredible ability to pin down the nuanced behaviors and thoughts that make us all paradoxically universal and unique.