Mary Gaitskill: preference

Transcript context

…Sure. What’s the danger of the rapid feedback? It drives you crazy, you get too upset, you always feel you have to respond, you can just ignore it, or . . . ? For you. For me, it’s that I feel like I have to respond. It’s not even that I feel I have to. I know I don’t have to, but if somebody says anything at all interesting, I want to respond. It’s very difficult for me not to respond because I’m curious, especially if it’s somebody who’s saying something that is very different from people I know in life. I have a couple of people on my Substack who comment every now and then. They don’t usually speak in a political way, but occasionally they do, and I learn they’re actually Trump supporters. I know very few. In fact, in my personal, I know one person who may be a Trump-supporter-ish person, but I know very few people like that, so I’m right away quite curious about that person. I don’t engage them politically, usually — or once I did. It’s interesting to me, if I don’t know a type of person, to have that opportunity to connect with them a little bit that way. What have you most learned about yourself, your own writing, from having started a Substack?…

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