Mary Gaitskill: belief

Transcript context

…Sure. What is that Tolstoy said? All happy families are the same; all unhappy families are different. I don’t think all happy people or families are the same, either, but I think the reasons that people are unhappy, or why they seem to just go to that place really easily, are quite varied. I think, if I could come up with a general reason — not talking about my characters right now, but talking about people — I think people who seem like they just want to be unhappy or are incurably unhappy — it doesn’t have to do with what they want. It’s usually because they’ve been hurt very early on, and not just once or twice. There’s a persistent pattern of them encountering enormous adversity. It doesn’t have to be social. It can be in their family. I guess that is social, but basically, they’re very injured, and so their strategy for life becomes how to protect themselves or how to cope with what they see as just a nonstop barrage of shitty experiences. And so that puts them in a posture that they — certainly without intending to — invite that. In terms of Velvet’s mother, that’s not what’s happening. She really, truly has had a rough life. If you’re in a foreign country, and you cannot speak the language, and you’re in a dangerous neighborhood, and you don’t even understand the social signals that are being sent by the people around you, and you’re in a social group that’s really looked down on, and you don’t even know how to respond to that or you have no means to respond to that — that’s hard. If you put on top of that, that she’s come from a very rough circumstance — there’s a little about her backstory there — you’re going to be in a posture of real defensiveness and just locked in. And that makes it very hard to move with any joyous energy, which is what her daughter learns in the book in riding horses. That’s her exposure to a free and joyous energy which she doesn’t get anywhere else. In the general case, is it a desire to be preemptive so you feel in control of the pain?…

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