I love Mary Gaitskill. This is her first novel. This book is structurally flawed, but I think the flaw is due to her focus and the material and probably unavoidable. (Her second novel, Veronica, is a diamond.) The prose is flawless. Her observations are incisive, honest, vicious, hilarious, and penetrating. And oddly comforting. I have read this book at least four or five times and don't doubt that I'll read it again.

I dock a star not so much for the aforementioned structural problems but becaus More...

Mary Gaitskill is one of my favorite authors. Her stories and novels are frightening, dark, and revealing. Her characters are often cruel, scared, ugly, and in pain. But they also seem familiar somehow, and sympathetic even when they should be unlikeable. Gaitskill's "girls" in this novel are developed through vignettes about their childhoods interspersed with present interactions between themselves and with others. I love this book especially for its satire of Ayn Rand (Anna Granite) and Object More...

Mary Gaitskill, no matter how indulgent you get, LYLAS (love you like a sister).

There's always a touch of the just-us-(decidedly twisted and perverse)-girlfriends mood in a Gaitskill work, but her short stories transcend dreaded chicklit chattiness with signature brutality and Schadenfreude. Yet somehow Gaitskill maintains every bit of the female-centeredness, beauty and body focus, and luxuriant quotidian that give chicklit its guilty power-appeal.

Ah, Gaitskill's short stories. They play like More...

In the first 3 pages of this book, i was ready to put it down. I found the prose self-consciously disinterested, the metaphors forced, and the characters unlikable. However, I had promised a good friend I would read it so I kept on. About page 20 the book got into a great rhythm. The narrators dual voice co-alesced as the main characters took shape. When the narrative began to sweep backward, through the childhoods of the "two girls", the book became one of those rare windows into the strange em More...

It's a good first novel but it has very weak points. The characters have moments of being real, but also long periods of being completely one-dimensional. We get it - one girl is fat, one is thin - but despite their physical differences they connect.

The Ayn Rand stuff didn't do much for me, but I thought Justine's journey was interesting enough to make it through the story. If you want to watch a good writer develop into a great writer, read this along with some of Gaitskill's later works. But o More...

With the caveat that I would probably not choose to read this a second time: this is a dense, dark, dramatic (but not unrealistic) look at the traumas of girlhood, in all of their forms. As one might expect from the title, Gaitskill's major points of exploration are body image, sexuality, and gendered power struggles, all sort of brilliantly set against the backdrop of a fictional Ayn Rand character and her work.

The most recommendable thing about this book is Gaitskill's writing. She's a writer More...

i turned to this in order to escape from Blood Meridian (which i hate a lot and think i might not finish at all), and at first it was refreshing to encounter female characters with interiority and subjective emotions, etc. for some reason, father-daughter sexual abuse is more palatable to me than diseased horses with swollen heads and drunk white dudes who kill random mexicans for no reason.

i read this quickly and remained fully engaged even on crowded subway rides. but in retrospect, i am not s More...

I am a fan of Gaitskill's dark themes, and unlike other reviewers I don't find it exploitative to cover child sexual abuse or sadomasochism in a novel.

It's easy to care for nice characters, warm characters, and average characters who do extraordinary, heroic things. Gaitskill has the ability to make us care for characters who aren't especially nice people, who don't do extraordinary things, and who have deeply rooted problems such as the "girls" (women) whose stories we hear.

I enjoyed the mock More...

It's always Gaitskill's observant writing, her sexy smarts that make her novels & stories so worthwhile. Tw Girls, Fat and Thin is engaging more because of the fascinating development of the characters's backstories and lives and for the singsong moments of her writing than any grand gesture or meaning, but is a fast and addictive read of escapism.

As always, her depiction of sadomasochism veers toward the subversive, always with very very damaged characters (a bit ironic considering the spe More...

Just finished this today, and was sad to let these two characters go. This is a traumatising book about two traumatised women, and it has no real resolution, like life itself. The book is fundamentally about people who fail to connect with anyone in their lives, despite being sensitive, intelligent, and monumentally lonely.

I am irritated by the cover blurb that calls the book "darkly erotic." I guess any time a woman writes about sex in an open, noneuphmetistic manner, that's "erotic." Clearly, More...

I nearly gave up after the first few pages, I persevered but wished I hadn't. The sadomasochistic element felt contrived and mechanical. Other reviewers praise her for her insight into the traumas of puberty and school girl relationships - really? I must have lived a very sheltered life, particularly the scenes of same sex abuse with a toothbrush, sure girls can be unkind, puberty can be confusing but this just felt like watching a bad late night film. I just didn't believe these characters or f More...

Utterly depressing. I appreciate, from a literary standpoint, what Gaitskill is trying to achieve, but after I read this book I pretty much wished I hadn't. She is a much stronger short story writer, in my opinion.

I enjoyed this book and found Gaitskill's insight about certain human conditions, namely loneliness, psychological trauma, and isolation from society, to be a haunting reminder of the cruelty that lies within human nature. Admittedly, there were moments where my skin crawled with disgust, and my mind could not comprehend the idea that one's father could have an incestuous relationship with his daughter for any extended period of time. Or, in Justine's situation, that a father could find out his More...

found this in a free box in the basement of my old apartment building a couple years ago. the main characters struck me as too tidily put together - like wow THEY'RE OPPOSITES BUT THE SAME! - and it drove me crazy the way they were carefully kept apart for the sake of driving towards the eye-rollingly contrived climax. plus, even though i hate ayn rand, i found all the objectivism parody stuff to be tiresome & over-the-top.

one (1) extra star for having a handful of painfully acute & brut More...

Try Mary Gaitskill's short stories first. You'll find a world of damaged people, reaching out to other damaged people in the human way we all do, usually to the detriment of both of them.

Get used to the odd language. Everything is alive. "The living room-like office was furnished with proud armchairs, a fiercely thin-cushioned sofa, a drawing of a geometric cat, and a radio that perpetually leaked a thin stream of classical music." Emotions manifest as colored lights, perception is skewed by the More...

A friend highly recommended this book to me and having read and liked her last novel "Veronica" I was eager to read it. Although I found the end of the beginning section to be a bit bland, I couldn't put it down once the book progressed past the initial character explanation phase. Gaitskill's prose is truly beautiful - a sharp contrast to the abject ugliness of her characters. Despite the lurid content which I would describe as neither erotic or sardonic, I did feel empathy for her tortured cha More...

This is one for the ladies...but it's not "chick lit" crap. It's dark, but very good.

Gaitskill's writing is luxuriously sloppy, and impossible to put down. Once again she investigates the world of sadomassochism, obsession, and the way damaged people can lose themselves in someone else (or the idea of someone else) to find themselves. Here she alternates from chapter to chapter between first-person narrated stories by the Fat Girl and third person narration by the Thin Girl, presumably to view different sides of each character. Unfortunately, both narrators sound somewhat alike. More...

I read some of Mary Gaitskill's short stories and thought I would read her first novel. I was looking forward to how she might develop characters given more pages. A brilliant short story author does not a brilliant novelist make! This novel could have used a healthy dose of the restraint she shows in her stories. The novel was too much of everything. I found it overwhelming, and not just because the subject matter is dark. A detail still needs to propel the reader further into the themes. I fou More...

Wow. Gaitskill writes about subjects that you wouldn't ever think you'd want to read about: incest, child sexual abuse, rape, sadomasochism, and sexual humiliation, in a manner that is psychologically incisive and rings true. If you can stomach the unbearably graphic scenes, the sheer beauty of her writing will keep you turning the pages. Her two protagonists are lonely, afraid, hurting, and highly intelligent. Makes you just want to give them a big hug, although they'd just reject it. I didn't, More...

I like giant robots. I like Batman. I like hard sci-fi, demon-hunters, and yes, even certain vampire flicks. Mary Gaitskill remains one of our great modern masters in part for her ability to compel my attention using none of these elements.

The title lays down all the groundwork in Two Girls, Fat and Thin. There's a girl who's fat, and a girl who's thin. They have coffee together. They talk. They to to war over an article the thin girl is writing about the work of Anna Granite and how it changed More...

A friend of mine who is an avid reader with nearly impeccable taste had recommended that I read the entire catalogue of her work, so when I ran across this book, I decided to give it a try.

Now, I'm no expert, but the story is centered around a dead writer whose books and individually driven philosophy closely resemble those and that of Ayn Rand. The two central characters (one fat, one thin) have lived lives running strangely parallel, though they were on opposite sides of a similar experience ( More...

A very strange and compelling narrative. The only reason it doesn't get five stars is because the ending is a little abrupt after the carefully measured pace of the rest of the narrative - but it works. It was just jarring when I read it the first time.

I'm not in the camp of "Oh, how grotesquely erotic and boundary-defying this is!" but I appreciate her intense attention to physical detail, during assault and pleasure both. Dorothy's voice is very unique.

I'm kind of an Ayn Rand hater, so that part of me loved this book. It's a sort of bitchy history of Ayn and her Objectivist movement in thinly veiled terms. But... it's more than that.

It includes Gaitskill's ideas about people, power dynamics and especially power dynamics. In the end, I like how Gaitskill uses the short form better. bad behavior is lovely.

Gaitskill brings a shocking ferocity to her short stories, but she is unable to sustain a narrative over the length of a novel. The shocks are still there on occasion, but they now come across as crass, manipulative and as a mere stand-in for truly delving into the characters. She seems to have some ambition, but her metaphors are forced and almost childishly comical and the overall quality of the writing is poor in comparison to her short fiction.

good. weird good. got me thinking about dirty sex in an intellectual way. if that's possible.



"Somebody opened me up in a way that I had no control over."



http://www.altx.com/int2/mary.gaitski... Gaitskill seems like a cool lady. This interview is funny because the journalist asks the author if she's ever turned a trick and she says "yes. have you?" lol

boring, boring, bored. i kept hoping it was going to get better. but it didn't. it just dragged on for 300 pages, and my attachments to the characters got lost along the way. to me, it felt like the novel was an attempt to write a self-reflexive examination of ayn rand & her books...with characters as in atlas, shrugged. but it all sort of came together in one big, confusing , frothy mess. too bad!

Mary Gaitskill has a way with words, that's for sure. I love her short story collection "Bad Behavior", not so sure I love this longer novel. The best thing the author does here is describe bullying, from the point of the tormentor and the tormented, delving into the pain of both characters and how, as adults, they have built emotional walls around themselves. Not an easy or pretty read by any means.

This book was one of a few books left in my vacation villa. It was a real page turner but so disturbing. Every page I read I thought, I really don't want to be reading this. But I became very wrapped up in the character's lives and I wanted to see how everyone turned out. So I guess you could say the writer was good but the subject was just plain awful to read about!

I wanted to give up on those girls, many times, but since
Gaitskill hung in there with them, I did too. But I trust that
having done that, I am thereby absolved from ever having to read
Ayn Rand or even having to find out whether or not Rand has anything to do with the themes of this heavy anchor of a book.