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3.5 AVERAGE
3.5 AVERAGE
dark
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
emotional
sad
I’m not sure that I enjoyed this book, but that said it’s an incredibly well written one! I can see how it would have made quite the mark in the early 90’s when it was published.
It’s absolutely one that needs two or even three reads to get the full scale and scope of what Gaitskill is trying to get across through the book, every sentence is impactful.
Check your triggers before reading, this is a dark dark book, ultimately about two female abuse survivors trying to find a way in a world that isn’t equipped to deal with their trauma.
It’s absolutely one that needs two or even three reads to get the full scale and scope of what Gaitskill is trying to get across through the book, every sentence is impactful.
Check your triggers before reading, this is a dark dark book, ultimately about two female abuse survivors trying to find a way in a world that isn’t equipped to deal with their trauma.
I think that this is the kind of book you need to read slowly. You can’t skim over any of it because you need to take the time to examine the meaning behind every sentence, every word before you can fully comprehend what Gaitskill is trying to say. I think I struggled to empathise with Justine and Dorothy because I haven’t connected with someone like that in so long to the point that every gesture or look clearly has hidden meaning. I also can’t remember the last time I felt that many emotions. I’ll probably read this again when I’m older, when I’ve experienced more of the world so that I can have a better understanding of what Gaitskill is highlighting about the world. It was good though, I just don’t think I have the capacity to appreciate it properly.
Dorothy though was a great character. Her struggles with her body and the hatred she harbours for it but the need to protect it and care for it because nobody else will. The expectations she built for her initial meeting with Granite and yet when Justine gave her the response she wanted to hear she wasn’t sure how to react. Her constant wavering, her overwhelming loneliness that she has somehow convinced herself she is okay with. Simply because she is overweight she’s convinced herself that she isn’t worthy of saying what she wants to, especially with the affair. She can’t see a place for herself in society. These romances have no place for someone that looks like her. The idea that someone could even want her sexually was so foreign to her because the only sexual experience she had came from hatred and abuse. Then when she eventually reads the article and her emotions become so heightened and all these fears she had about being judged and having people perceive her in certain ways just disappear.
Justine on the other hand is completely self aware and knows that the way she lives her life isn’t fulfilling but she does nothing to change it. She accepts that in another universe there’s a more successful version of herself but makes no attempt to try and become better. Her childhood self who gave in to peer pressure and the need to be accepted by others, ruined her ability to form meaningful relationships. She relies on sex and the fact that she’s basically a masochist to have some control over her emotions. If she allows these people to hurt her then when they leave it won’t affect her because they were jerks anyway.
The ending of the book was lovely for me because these two women who have lived such different lives and who barely understand each other yet somehow know each other so completely have just given in. This complete exhaustion has forced them to accept that maybe they don’t want to be lonely anymore and maybe they want to be loved and to love and to not simply be judged for things they did and didn’t do.
Dorothy though was a great character. Her struggles with her body and the hatred she harbours for it but the need to protect it and care for it because nobody else will. The expectations she built for her initial meeting with Granite and yet when Justine gave her the response she wanted to hear she wasn’t sure how to react. Her constant wavering, her overwhelming loneliness that she has somehow convinced herself she is okay with. Simply because she is overweight she’s convinced herself that she isn’t worthy of saying what she wants to, especially with the affair. She can’t see a place for herself in society. These romances have no place for someone that looks like her. The idea that someone could even want her sexually was so foreign to her because the only sexual experience she had came from hatred and abuse. Then when she eventually reads the article and her emotions become so heightened and all these fears she had about being judged and having people perceive her in certain ways just disappear.
Justine on the other hand is completely self aware and knows that the way she lives her life isn’t fulfilling but she does nothing to change it. She accepts that in another universe there’s a more successful version of herself but makes no attempt to try and become better. Her childhood self who gave in to peer pressure and the need to be accepted by others, ruined her ability to form meaningful relationships. She relies on sex and the fact that she’s basically a masochist to have some control over her emotions. If she allows these people to hurt her then when they leave it won’t affect her because they were jerks anyway.
The ending of the book was lovely for me because these two women who have lived such different lives and who barely understand each other yet somehow know each other so completely have just given in. This complete exhaustion has forced them to accept that maybe they don’t want to be lonely anymore and maybe they want to be loved and to love and to not simply be judged for things they did and didn’t do.
challenging
dark
emotional
medium-paced
dark
sad
tense
Loveable characters:
No
i wanted to dnf this so bad by the misery that was part two but kept reading because... ??? i like mary gaitskill's writing enough to have slogged through this, and wanted to celebrate by the time i was close to the non-ending of an ending.
reads like the edgy early 90s novel that it is. somehow contains a fictional ayn rand character and a full page (probably half page in print) description of skid row's 18 and life music video??? take a drink every time justine buys a bag of cookies to eat.
i don't know what this was other than sad, bleak, and unpleasant. not the type of novel i want to spend my time with; the older i get, the less time i have for stories that are edgy and hopeless and just SAD like this one. whoever wrote the book description and called this "erotic" and full of "wicked wit," we need to have strong words. the "pathos" descriptor was much, much, much, much more accurate.
ugh
reads like the edgy early 90s novel that it is. somehow contains a fictional ayn rand character and a full page (probably half page in print) description of skid row's 18 and life music video??? take a drink every time justine buys a bag of cookies to eat.
i don't know what this was other than sad, bleak, and unpleasant. not the type of novel i want to spend my time with; the older i get, the less time i have for stories that are edgy and hopeless and just SAD like this one. whoever wrote the book description and called this "erotic" and full of "wicked wit," we need to have strong words. the "pathos" descriptor was much, much, much, much more accurate.
ugh
Content Warnings
Moderate: Child abuse, Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Incest, Pedophilia, Rape, Sexual assault, Sexual violence
“The mob on the platform grew in number, everyone bearing down hard on the track of daily habit, staring into the maw of the impending day, pacing in insect circles, pitching their thoughts and feelings into the future or the past, anywhere but the subway.”
"He just kept saying 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry.' It was a permanent rift, and none of their ideas, however great, could help them."
"She had backed herself into a corner, and surrounded herself with wimps and that's why she wound up playing Twenty Questions with sycophants instead of leading a movement."
"She looked at me frankly, perhaps a little sadly, as she placed her cup on the table and reclaimed her pen and pad. 'I hope I'm not taking too much of your time' she said."
"When the women in Granite's books submit, they do it out of strength, out of choice, as a gift. That's the difference between masochism and love, and if you don't see that, then you're crazy."
"Her sisters' jeering hurt her, but it also roused and locked into position a surprising element of strength that dignified her melancholy zeal, which caused her unkind sisters to remember her, in their broken-down middle years, with pathos and respect."
"He is talking about important things. He sounds angry, but the anger is sleek and shaped to look like something else;"
"She stayed and stayed, and it never did any good. No matter how many stories she told or listened to, no matter how many times she stroked my back with her fingertips, I felt the same emptiness and panic when she left."
"She'd leave and I'd be left with my hideous, rearing thoughts. I would fixate on the strip of light coming from my partly open door, listening to the TV and radio voices, trying to figure out where my parents were and what they were doing from the sound of their footsteps, chair-creakings, and voices. Then they went to bed and the light was gone. Some nights I lay in such anxiety that I could sleep only when morning came. Throughout the day, the residue of the night's tension stayed in my body."
"The theme was about fighting and winning but it was also about something more subtle and intimate, something voluptuous. I didn't know exactly what this something was;"
"Once Justine put her finger on the wall and dirt came off on it; she felt like she was in a story about poor people. She loved the picture of the beautiful doe-eyed Jesus with the dimly flaming purple heart."
"What if you do something bad but you believe in God? What if you believe in God but you're always doing really bad things? What if you do something bad but you're sorry?"
"dismay at seeing an eternity of torture and punishment presented as an amusing possibility. She sat with the now familiar sensation of violation coursing through her body as if it could split her apart. She was at home when she saw this, and she ran to her mother, crying."
"On the rare occasions when he went somewhere without her, she would clutch his shirt and look at him with an expression that seemed to come all the way from the back of her head. She would ask when he would be back in a way that made Justine wonder if he might not come back at all."
"she'd sometimes hold off on going to pee-- the mounting pressure, so uncomfortable it made her squirm."
"It made her puzzled and sad that they could only have politeness and decency between them."
"If you're smart, you're almost always a misfit. And when you're young that can be tough. But when you get older, you can make the world into what you want it to be, not the other way around. Remember that."
"I asker her what "queer" meant. 'It means odd, or unusual. Why?' 'Some boys came up while I was reading and said Ohio was a queer state.' 'That just means they don't know much about Ohio.'"
"It made me feel something for other people, an awful connection with dead strangers more intimate than any relationship I had with my living peers."
"The television presentation padded it enough so that it induced a mild feeling of sorrow and sensitivity instead of actual pain. After all, the actress who played Anne Frank had said in the end, 'I believe people are basically good,' and the announcer had talked about the triumph of the human spirit, even though there were all those corpses."
"the fear and isolation that I took to be a normal state when among people other than my mother and father."
"She got bored and didn't want to play, and I felt it was because I wasn't good enough."
"I felt as if I had been stripped of clothing; her second of kindness pierced me and touched a naked private place so unused to contact that I cringed with shame and discomfort, as if a stranger had put a hand down my pants."
"Justine would imitate them, when she did, sometimes a door would open and she'd step into a world where it was really very chic to walk around in public with wet underpants, giggling while strange boys in leather jackets and pointed shoes called you a slut."
"a reckless prepubescent ardor ready to crucify itself on a heartless boy."
"This insulting mockery of friendship hadn't been what she had imagined when she'd resolved to be kind, but she was afraid to interfere again."
"She smiled in fake innocence, fake sophistication, and real sexuality. Her gold eyes were half-lidded and glinting."
"For, in creating the imaginary world inside me, I had abandoned the world that had existed between my parents and me."
"I stared at my plate and wept. Those dinner tribunals occurred with such frequency that I developed the ability to divide myself while they occurred; the external person who sat and cried while her father reviled her and the internal person who helped herself to more salad as he ranted."
"This was so unexpected that I had no time to create a padding of numbness."
"I felt tension vibrating the length of his arm and hand, the tension of his complicated love for me, and I felt something like pity for him, as well as sorrow that I could no longer fully be a part of his life, nor invite him into mine."
"But I believed that under the destroyed integrity, the broken bones and humiliated character, the ghost of love flitted amid the ruins, moving from broken pillar to broken pillar, hiding behind a pile of rubble. On some deep, unfathomable level, where the pressure would burst human lungs and flatten three-dimensional bodies, where life took the form of eyeless, headless creatures with wobbling tentacles and undulating hammerlike tails, their love survived, faithful, luminous and totally useless."
"so deeply sensitive to the viciousness and dishonesty in the world that she would disfigure her own integrity and insult her body with subhuman lovers rather than let her natural purity exist side by side with corruption."
"At night she sat in the living room with her parents and watched newscasters tell stories illustrated by dramatic film clips of men being led away in handcuffs, men talking behind desks, men giving speeches, men angrily shaking their fingers, and, at the end, smiling women serving muffins to old people or playing with children."
"Her mother exercised still, and her pelvis and belly were strong and sturdy, full of deep sounds and smells, yet ugly and coarse, helpless and rejected in their ugly strength. Justine looked at her and wanted to be delicate and weak forever."
"I shared a dorm room with a beautiful neurotic who clung to her beauty as if it were a chance piece of debris keeping her afloat on a violent sea."
"One Saturday night when my roommate was out being neurotic, while I sat on my bed with my French homework scattered about,"
"I could determine my own world and reject anything that made it an unhappy place."
"'Do you find yourself often alone?' 'Yes.' 'I thought so.' 'How could you tell?' 'By your arrogance. You are very arrogant. I mean that as a compliment.' She thought of... victims of disturbed families."
"Through this armor his deformed sensitivity strained to find the thundering abstracts of beauty and heroism that that consoled it."
"I was sorry she'd been molested as a child, but ultimately one has to take responsibility for one's self, including one's phone manners."
"We had nothing to say to each other, yet we felt a bond based on the unspoken sense of an elusive similarity between us and the fear that if we actually got to know one another the result would be disappointment."
"At this moment I felt acutely my mother as she was in Ohio, still young, still pretty, and in my child's eyes so much more than pretty that "pretty" would demean features that to me were the fine articulation of her deep internal life, which made meaningless the social concept of "pretty.""
"I had been stronger than my parents. I had been damn strong to survive a childhood that was completely lacking in emotional or mental sustenance and in fact would've killed most people. And it was my strength that had made my father hate me."
"I did not feel her gaze boring through my pores to envelop my swooning spirit; I felt her at the perimeters of myself, attentive, very close, but respectful, waiting for me to reveal myself. So I didn't swoon. I stood and met her gaze and felt my self, habitually held so deep and tight, come out to meet her with the quavering steps of someone whose feet have been asleep for a long, long time."
"What is your name? I mean your real name, not the one your parents gave you."
"'She is really the mover and shaker of the family. She still manages a floor of Bloomingdale's and she is sixty-seven years old.' 'That's wonderful.'"
"She has lilac-point Siamese cats and a few strong, handsome, powerful lovers who never stand her up or make her feel awful."
TBD
"She had backed herself into a corner, and surrounded herself with wimps and that's why she wound up playing Twenty Questions with sycophants instead of leading a movement."
"She looked at me frankly, perhaps a little sadly, as she placed her cup on the table and reclaimed her pen and pad. 'I hope I'm not taking too much of your time' she said."
"When the women in Granite's books submit, they do it out of strength, out of choice, as a gift. That's the difference between masochism and love, and if you don't see that, then you're crazy."
"Her sisters' jeering hurt her, but it also roused and locked into position a surprising element of strength that dignified her melancholy zeal, which caused her unkind sisters to remember her, in their broken-down middle years, with pathos and respect."
"He is talking about important things. He sounds angry, but the anger is sleek and shaped to look like something else;"
"She stayed and stayed, and it never did any good. No matter how many stories she told or listened to, no matter how many times she stroked my back with her fingertips, I felt the same emptiness and panic when she left."
"She'd leave and I'd be left with my hideous, rearing thoughts. I would fixate on the strip of light coming from my partly open door, listening to the TV and radio voices, trying to figure out where my parents were and what they were doing from the sound of their footsteps, chair-creakings, and voices. Then they went to bed and the light was gone. Some nights I lay in such anxiety that I could sleep only when morning came. Throughout the day, the residue of the night's tension stayed in my body."
"The theme was about fighting and winning but it was also about something more subtle and intimate, something voluptuous. I didn't know exactly what this something was;"
"Once Justine put her finger on the wall and dirt came off on it; she felt like she was in a story about poor people. She loved the picture of the beautiful doe-eyed Jesus with the dimly flaming purple heart."
"What if you do something bad but you believe in God? What if you believe in God but you're always doing really bad things? What if you do something bad but you're sorry?"
"dismay at seeing an eternity of torture and punishment presented as an amusing possibility. She sat with the now familiar sensation of violation coursing through her body as if it could split her apart. She was at home when she saw this, and she ran to her mother, crying."
"On the rare occasions when he went somewhere without her, she would clutch his shirt and look at him with an expression that seemed to come all the way from the back of her head. She would ask when he would be back in a way that made Justine wonder if he might not come back at all."
"she'd sometimes hold off on going to pee-- the mounting pressure, so uncomfortable it made her squirm."
"It made her puzzled and sad that they could only have politeness and decency between them."
"If you're smart, you're almost always a misfit. And when you're young that can be tough. But when you get older, you can make the world into what you want it to be, not the other way around. Remember that."
"I asker her what "queer" meant. 'It means odd, or unusual. Why?' 'Some boys came up while I was reading and said Ohio was a queer state.' 'That just means they don't know much about Ohio.'"
"It made me feel something for other people, an awful connection with dead strangers more intimate than any relationship I had with my living peers."
"The television presentation padded it enough so that it induced a mild feeling of sorrow and sensitivity instead of actual pain. After all, the actress who played Anne Frank had said in the end, 'I believe people are basically good,' and the announcer had talked about the triumph of the human spirit, even though there were all those corpses."
"the fear and isolation that I took to be a normal state when among people other than my mother and father."
"She got bored and didn't want to play, and I felt it was because I wasn't good enough."
"I felt as if I had been stripped of clothing; her second of kindness pierced me and touched a naked private place so unused to contact that I cringed with shame and discomfort, as if a stranger had put a hand down my pants."
"Justine would imitate them, when she did, sometimes a door would open and she'd step into a world where it was really very chic to walk around in public with wet underpants, giggling while strange boys in leather jackets and pointed shoes called you a slut."
"a reckless prepubescent ardor ready to crucify itself on a heartless boy."
"This insulting mockery of friendship hadn't been what she had imagined when she'd resolved to be kind, but she was afraid to interfere again."
"She smiled in fake innocence, fake sophistication, and real sexuality. Her gold eyes were half-lidded and glinting."
"For, in creating the imaginary world inside me, I had abandoned the world that had existed between my parents and me."
"I stared at my plate and wept. Those dinner tribunals occurred with such frequency that I developed the ability to divide myself while they occurred; the external person who sat and cried while her father reviled her and the internal person who helped herself to more salad as he ranted."
"This was so unexpected that I had no time to create a padding of numbness."
"I felt tension vibrating the length of his arm and hand, the tension of his complicated love for me, and I felt something like pity for him, as well as sorrow that I could no longer fully be a part of his life, nor invite him into mine."
"But I believed that under the destroyed integrity, the broken bones and humiliated character, the ghost of love flitted amid the ruins, moving from broken pillar to broken pillar, hiding behind a pile of rubble. On some deep, unfathomable level, where the pressure would burst human lungs and flatten three-dimensional bodies, where life took the form of eyeless, headless creatures with wobbling tentacles and undulating hammerlike tails, their love survived, faithful, luminous and totally useless."
"so deeply sensitive to the viciousness and dishonesty in the world that she would disfigure her own integrity and insult her body with subhuman lovers rather than let her natural purity exist side by side with corruption."
"At night she sat in the living room with her parents and watched newscasters tell stories illustrated by dramatic film clips of men being led away in handcuffs, men talking behind desks, men giving speeches, men angrily shaking their fingers, and, at the end, smiling women serving muffins to old people or playing with children."
"Her mother exercised still, and her pelvis and belly were strong and sturdy, full of deep sounds and smells, yet ugly and coarse, helpless and rejected in their ugly strength. Justine looked at her and wanted to be delicate and weak forever."
"I shared a dorm room with a beautiful neurotic who clung to her beauty as if it were a chance piece of debris keeping her afloat on a violent sea."
"One Saturday night when my roommate was out being neurotic, while I sat on my bed with my French homework scattered about,"
"I could determine my own world and reject anything that made it an unhappy place."
"'Do you find yourself often alone?' 'Yes.' 'I thought so.' 'How could you tell?' 'By your arrogance. You are very arrogant. I mean that as a compliment.' She thought of... victims of disturbed families."
"Through this armor his deformed sensitivity strained to find the thundering abstracts of beauty and heroism that that consoled it."
"I was sorry she'd been molested as a child, but ultimately one has to take responsibility for one's self, including one's phone manners."
"We had nothing to say to each other, yet we felt a bond based on the unspoken sense of an elusive similarity between us and the fear that if we actually got to know one another the result would be disappointment."
"At this moment I felt acutely my mother as she was in Ohio, still young, still pretty, and in my child's eyes so much more than pretty that "pretty" would demean features that to me were the fine articulation of her deep internal life, which made meaningless the social concept of "pretty.""
"I had been stronger than my parents. I had been damn strong to survive a childhood that was completely lacking in emotional or mental sustenance and in fact would've killed most people. And it was my strength that had made my father hate me."
"I did not feel her gaze boring through my pores to envelop my swooning spirit; I felt her at the perimeters of myself, attentive, very close, but respectful, waiting for me to reveal myself. So I didn't swoon. I stood and met her gaze and felt my self, habitually held so deep and tight, come out to meet her with the quavering steps of someone whose feet have been asleep for a long, long time."
"What is your name? I mean your real name, not the one your parents gave you."
"'She is really the mover and shaker of the family. She still manages a floor of Bloomingdale's and she is sixty-seven years old.' 'That's wonderful.'"
"She has lilac-point Siamese cats and a few strong, handsome, powerful lovers who never stand her up or make her feel awful."
TBD
I like the way Gaitskill names her characters (‘Justine Shade’ wrecked by sadomasochistic fantasies, ‘Dorothy Never’ seeking perpetual escape). I am not sure I liked the narrative structure of this book quite as much - influenced by Nabokov with opening Nabokov quote to boot, but little of Nabokov’s sardonic gaze actually settling into the narrative (only hints of Speak, Memory colouring its descriptive writing).
Two Girls, Fat and Thin does not seem as original and exciting in 2022 as it might have done in 1991 because, as cleverer people have pointed out, we have since reached a critical mass of tell-all incest stories. Incest stories coupled with ruminations about disordered eating are even rifer. The shock value melts away. What sticks instead is the book’s central, idolised literary figure, Anna Granite, who is really Ayn Rand - genuine subversion!
My blog
Two Girls, Fat and Thin does not seem as original and exciting in 2022 as it might have done in 1991 because, as cleverer people have pointed out, we have since reached a critical mass of tell-all incest stories. Incest stories coupled with ruminations about disordered eating are even rifer. The shock value melts away. What sticks instead is the book’s central, idolised literary figure, Anna Granite, who is really Ayn Rand - genuine subversion!
My blog
This is a lovely fearless rendering of a relationship between two broken people. Caitskill loves her characters without forgiving them. It's a repeater.
dark
emotional
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes