Mary Gaitskill (born November 11, 1954) is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer.

She has lived in New York City, Toronto, San Francisco, Marin County and Pennsylvania, and attended the University of Michigan, where she earned her B.A.

'A Romantic Weekend' and 'Secretary' both explore themes of BDSM and psychological aspects of dominance and submission in sexual relationships.

Gaitskill's 1994 essay in Harper's also addresses feminist debates about date rape, victimization, and responsibility.

She describes ways that individual subjectivity influences all experiences, making it impossible to come to "universally agreed-upon conclusions.

When journalist Justine interviews Dorothy for an exposé of Definitism, an unusual relationship begins between the two women.

I would say it had to do with her childhood, not because she was sexually abused, but because the world that she was presented with was so inadequate in terms of giving her a full-spirited sense of herself.

Published in The New Yorker magazine on March 27, 2023, the second version continues with the main character revisiting her employer after several decades.

In an interview with Deborah Treisman in The New Yorker, she explained what the main character Debbie feels: The MeToo movement, though it's not explicitly named, has caused her to look back and think about her experience differently... in a perverse way, what the lawyer did awakened her and made her feel more alive than before or since.

Ginger is a middle-aged woman who meets Velvet, a young adolescent, through The Fresh Air Fund.

Writing of Veronica and Gaitskill's career in Harper's Magazine in March 2006, Wyatt Mason said: Through four books over eighteen years, Mary Gaitskill has been formulating her fiction around the immutable question of how we manage to live in a seemingly inscrutable world.

Until Veronica, however, she had never ventured to show fully how life could also be made a place where, despite all, we find meaningful release.Gaitskill's favorite writers have changed over time, as she noted in a 2005 interview,[13] but one constant is the author Vladimir Nabokov, whose Lolita "will be on my ten favorites list until the end of my life."