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Because They Wanted To: Stories
by Mary Gaitskill
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Simon & Schuster (1997-01-17)
ISBN: 0684808560
EAN: 9780684808567
Dewy Decimal #: 813.54
Hardcover: 256 pages
SKU: M135303
Condition: New
Comments: 0684808560 This 1997 hardcover is in brand new condition and shows minimal shelf wear; gift quality, pretty. Your book will be carefully protected for transit in sturdy, weather-resistant packaging. We are prompt, efficient, communicative.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
An author of Two Girls, Fat and Thin shares a collection of stories about people who want badly but, at the same time, do not quite know what they want and whose wants conflict with their deeper needs and moral sense of the world. 17,500 first printing.
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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.
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Customer Reviews
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Great writing
Rating  (5)
Date: 2008-04-14
Good stuff. She has a perspective on "alternative" lifestyles that is honest and not just shock value. All of the taboo activities her characters participate in are part of her exploration through human drive and desire.
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Kraft-Ebbing meets Miss Lonelyhearts
Rating (5)
Date: 2008-02-22
I'd still recommend starting with "Bad Behavior" if you haven't read any Gaitskill before. She gets more ambitious and profound as she gets older and the reading is not as easy. In this short story collection the character descriptions are clever but sometimes bewildering, such as "a thin excitable woman who appeared to be keeping a strict inner watch over an invisible set of perfectly balanced inner objects, lest any of them fall over or even fractionally shift position."
The first nine stories are about screenwriters, philosophers, hookers, musicians, dentists, social workers, vagrants etc in California, Seattle, Vancouver, Iowa and Greenwich Village. Plots are (very roughly) as follows:
Lesbian tells all about homophobic father.
Runaway babysitter gets stiffed.
Psychopharmacologist neglects sick sister for bisexual social worker.
Rape fantasy spoils relationship.
Girl friend doesn't send a get well card.
Rapist confesses (perhaps to victim).
Helpful dentist is too shy.
Screenwriter tells all about actress ex.
The last four stories are interrelated, about a group of San Franciscans whose love lives are exemplified by " Ellie called, very excited, to tell me about her cutting experience with the dominatrix" which is vintage Gaitskill stuff. Enjoy.
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A strange jangling beauty
Rating (5)
Date: 2005-06-11
5 out of 5 customers found this reveiw helpful
Some readers may argue that Gaitskill's characters merely resist growing up, and it's certainly true that their lives are much more in an uproar, much more in flux than the lives of their peers who are married with children. And yet to dismiss them as piquant malcontents seems unfair--they are, after all, after a more profound and dangerous intimacy than the intimacy that might be found in more stable relationships. Gaitskill has also managed to achieve, in this third book, a moving away from the voyeuristic; this has made the work inevitably quieter, and has even made some of the characters seem almost "normal".
In Tiny, Smiling Daddy, the opening story in Because They Wanted To, a sexually prodigal daughter discharges "her strange jangling beauty" into her father's house, "changing the molecules of its air". In another story (Processing), a waitress, "vibrant with purpose" pours water for her dinner guests "with a harried rattle of ice". At a party in Palo Alto, light "runs and flirts on silverware". All of these glimpses into Gaitskill's latest stories illustrate how charged her language can be, and how much it is animated (in spite of its dark themes) by both boldness and joie de vivre.
In other Gaitskill stories, many of the characters act as impish raconteurs of narratives that reveal their own pain or shame. Their audience is made up of a sort of floating opera of fast friends, scoffers, and therapists manque. Privacy is sacrificed to get at "the truth" about both intimacy and the potential that life has for the playful (and in particular for the sexually playful) to be extended into adulthood. But sex, in Gaitskill's world, is mischievous, cerebral, brutal, or even described with an almost dainty candour, the one thing it is not is sexy.
There are also exquisite moments of non-sexual tenderness. In one of the final stories, a poet who teaches at Berkeley says of one of her students: "He didn't write very well, but he was a passionate student and so was a favourite of mine. He took me in with a wistful, subtle movement of his eyes. I felt him accept my fondness and shyly give it back. Without knowing it, he comforted me." But then Gaitskill's theme is (and always has been) intimacy: how to find it, create it, retrieve it, bestow it. And also--and this is where the tragedy in much of her work locates itself--how it's only longed for, squandered, or lost.
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Stunning Stories!
Rating (5)
Date: 2005-04-11
7 out of 7 customers found this reveiw helpful
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.
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Brilliant!!!
Rating (5)
Date: 2004-12-06
3 out of 3 customers found this reveiw helpful
BECAUSE THEY WANTED TO is an absolute masterpiece of literature! Gaitskill's ability to describe the most complex and dark human emotions is stunning; each story is well-written down to the smallest detail, and you are able to relate to the pain of the characters--even if you have never experienced the things that they are going through yourself.
"The Wrong Thing," a four-part story of one woman's inability to find a meaningful romantic relationship, was my favorite one in the book. The main character, Susan, is presented in a way that allows readers to feel her pain and to sympathize with her as she goes through various struggles. This story was the last one in the collection, and its ending was also a great ending for the entire book.
The other stories are also good: from a woman who is obsessed with her dentist, to a 16-year-old runaway who is just trying to find ways to support herself, to a woman who realizes that she just might love a much younger man...these stories all touch the soul. This collection is in some ways lighter than Gaitskill's gritty BAD BEHAVIOR, but it is still full of complexity and people who display extreme examples of human emotion.
Highly recommended!!!
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