Thank you Mary for writing this. I was raped and sexually abused by my therapist two to three times a week for 11 months after a year and a half of relentless grooming by him. I was raped at least sixty times by my calculation, a number that is hard for me to accept or comprehend. The entire experience is hard for me to comprehend. It was far more complex and strange and slippery and horrific than I would have imagined something like this would be before this happened and it left me annihilated, empty, suffering frequent flashbacks, nightmares, dissociative moments, and also, revoltingly, pining for him, or pining for some illusion of comfort and safety and care and love he conjured in me as my therapist. Oh god, it is so awful, truly, when I think about it, which is every day, for long periods during every day, for months on end. The worst, in some ways, are the unwelcome, unpredictable, moments of pining, which make me nauseated and fill me with deep, deep shame. My mind is obsessed with what happened because I cannot make sense of it, I do not understand it, I do not understand my self during it (or after), I struggle, even now, after many hours of therapy (with a good therapist) and obscene hours of thinking about it, to understand or feel any sort of clarity about what happened to me except that this man, a monster, a true monster, took control of me slowly over time using his access to me and my trust and all of my most personal fears and moments, and then used me as something akin to a sex doll for months on end. As I said, it was an annihilating experience. If someone said, "I was raped by my therapist," I would have had some somewhat straightforwardly fraught and horrible event in mind. But the reality is far more complicated and in that way, perhaps more terrible, at least for me, than I would have ever imagined. I have to think this is true of so much abuse, that is an unimaginable human experience unless you have the misfortune of enduring it. Thank you Mary for capturing the complexity of this unfortunate part of the human experience.
I really feel for you. Especially this: "My mind is obsessed with what happened because I cannot make sense of it." That is the most terrible and bewildering feeling. I want to say "I'm sorry" but its so inadequate. I am glad if the story helped even a little. I know it helps me sometimes to see certain things represented clearly. So glad if I could do that, it was part of my motive for writing it. I wish you the best.
Mary, thank you for your reply and for your kind words. In the wake of this catastrophe, I have almost compulsively searched for art that can help me understand what happened to me and make me feel a little less alone.
I have a long list of pieces that captured, in one way or another, a piece of my experience and were helpful, among them William Faulkner's Sanctuary, Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive, Nastassja Martin's In the Eye of the Wild, Olivia Wilde's (in my opinion unfairly derided) Don't Worry Darling and Dorothea Tanning's painting Musical Chairs. The list is much longer than this, and now it includes Minority Report. Young Debby's return to Ned's office despite his abuse, and then her return to him a lifetime later to confront him, and his multifaceted, still-predatory, extraordinarily narcissistic response to her (and her physical attack on him), all rang true to me.
I have not confronted my abuser, and will not as I am extremely afraid of him. As I said, he is a monster, and I feel uncertain what he is capable of doing. I have, however, thought often about what it would be like to see him again and confront him with what he did to me, and to ask why he did it and to tell him how vile and evil he is. I would guess this sort of confrontation would be immensely unrewarding, to be honest, as I think he would behave similarly to Ned, with a lot of self-pity, excuses and perhaps a wolfish hope that he could get me back on his couch again.
So, with my own confrontation off the table, I found reading about Debby's confrontation with Ned cathartic. It was validating somehow. I also think you captured the way these experiences shape a person's future and haunts their present in the form of often banal dreams. All of this is true of me. Anyway, I am rambling. I just want to say that your story captured something very true for me, I saw something of myself reflected in it, and in that way, it helped me a little bit to understand myself, which is a rare gift indeed.
I will add that I expected to add the movie Women Talking to this list, but it left me cold. I am an N of 1, but the movie struck me as false, somehow, in that I do not think the women, having had their world turned upside down, would then debate calmly and clearly what to do. They learned the men in their lives had betrayed them in the most horrific way, that their entire worldview was shaky, and that they could not trust the very foundation of their social order. I would imagine they would be in utter shock. How could they possibly process this so quickly? In a matter of days? Ridiculous. I would imagine many of them would refuse to believe it, would cling to the old lies ferociously because the truth is so horrible and hard to accept. Women Talking was an academic debate set in a hayloft, not a reflection of real life, in my opinion.
I would also love to know from Maggie Gyllenhaal’s perspective whether her view of the character has evolved now that she’s a director and has stated how she feels that the female gaze on stories is different since Secretary was directed by a man.
Mary, you are one of my favorite authors. The way you write each character with such tenderness, no matter their "perversions"; and you are never a tourist about their perversions. Two Girls, Fat and Thin, was so masterful...never did I think I could feel empathy for someone who loves (someone I assume is meant to be) Ayn Rand. But I cried for Dorothy and loved her.
I too have "the thing." I don't know where it came from - I spent years in therapy trying to figure out what terrible thing must have happened to me to create it. I have no answers. I don't know why my fiercest wish since 13 was to be preyed upon and discarded cruelly.
I spent my late teens, 20s, and 30s chasing _the thing_. I ran headlong into relationships with older men who I thought could give it to me.
"Frank: But you’ve been with older men before?
Zoe: Yes…
Frank: Then you know they hurt you? And after they hurt you, they discard you.
Zoe: You can’t hurt me"
And like the quotation, I was hurt and discarded - just like I had hoped I would be. I stopped chasing the thing about 5 years ago after being so carelessly dashed against the rocks I didn't think I could survive it.
I appreciate the distinction you make here between the character in your short story and the one in the movie. In my late teens and early 20s I was too young, without a fully-formed mind, and no adult man should have taken advantage of that but they did. I don't know why I relate so hard to Winter Mama when it's not the same thing at all.
When I saw your name in this month's New Yorker I sat down immediately and read it, about an hour ago. When I saw "I like dull work" I felt my heart race and my ears ring.
Thank you for writing this story. I don't want to spoil the story for anyone, so that's all I'll say. I've been sitting here crying and I went to find you online to tell you how much this story meant to me.
Thank *you* for replying to my writing. Especially Two Girls. I had very little idea what I was doing when I wrote that--perhaps like one has no idea what they are doing when they chase "the thing?"--so I'm amazed at how well it turned out. I wish I could understand better than you but I probably don't. "Masochism" must be part of it, but somehow that concept seems too simple even if its deep. I don't want to start babbling here! But I hope you one day catch the right "thing."
I think that is why I had such trouble reading BAD BEHAVIOR as opposed to later books. I think the characters suffering is too potent for me to breathe through. I am so conscious of it that it hurts and it feels like self-harm almost. I feel like this cycle of this particular behavior is so massive and repetitive that it makes it hard for me to feel indifferent about, get out of bed in morning. And the whole victimization/victimology/experiencer themself has been so picked apart that there's almost nothing left of the original event. Ohhhh Mary, this is the hard stuff. How do you go there? How did you get (t)here?
I don't know how I got there. Secretary is a painful story but I don't feel that way about every story in BB. Even Secretary in my mind has some humor and there's goodness in the character who is, as I said in the piece, honest and dignified about what is happening throughout. But I know a lot of people feel as you do, or did. But given how you feel, I'm glad you were willing to give my other books a chance.
Well I feel it in a kind of ironic sense. In the sense that the honesty was so piercing that it kind of hurts. But hurt is good and leads to something special.
I meant character from each story. Even though that is what I try to do in my fiction, it was hard having it reflected back at me. Proust called this "reciprocal torture" & Virginal Woolf, "looking glass shame".
Your observation of why readers (and Hollywood) thinks we need uplifting endings is so clear. You say, "I think we remain deeply discomfited by victims unless their victimization is clear-cut and looks like it might be remedied by rational, socially mandated action. What goes on inside Debby does not fit into that category.” The sad discomfort in both stories, Secretary and Minority Report, are what make them feel so “true.” Such pathos in familiar, mundane details. Hoping to see a movie version of Minority Report!
Secretary is such a masterpiece. I can think of it cinematically (I have not seen the movie) as I read it, the scenes are vivid. It is as you said, a language story, difficult to translate into film. Like trying to make a film of that Kate Chopin story where a woman imagines life without her husband. I forget that title. Now I'll have to watch the movie. Thanks for this.
I read the story and then saw the film and had a bad reaction to it which I later realized was my expectations running closer to the story than to the edgy sexy romp the film was trying to be. My friends loved it and it is a clever film, but I appreciate your resurrecting Debby, because her story resonates with many and deserves to be honestly told.
Dear Mary, thank you for writing with this special point of view. Your "camera" is always perfectly focused on the most nuanced events. This is the greatest talent of your writing. I am an Italian journalist, I wrote an article on Minority Report in the newspaper Il Foglio. How can I send you it?
As a former teacher of "Expository Writing" that focused specifically on fiction, I'm sorry I never had the chance to assign "Secretary" and "Minority Report" as a contrast and compare regarding artistic choices -- with extra credit for referencing all the related Gaitskill essays and substacks as well as the New Yorker online feature about revisiting "Secretary" -- and extra extra credit for discussing Freudian theories of erotic masochism.
I don't have strong opinions about Haiku, I don't feel I understand it very well as an art form. But no I don't think its cheap, etc. I don't know why anyone would think that about a whole form of poetry.
It's just so short. I find that when I'm especially fatigued it's the best I can do but I don't feel like my Reader is satisfied by something so small.
Thank you Mary for writing this. I was raped and sexually abused by my therapist two to three times a week for 11 months after a year and a half of relentless grooming by him. I was raped at least sixty times by my calculation, a number that is hard for me to accept or comprehend. The entire experience is hard for me to comprehend. It was far more complex and strange and slippery and horrific than I would have imagined something like this would be before this happened and it left me annihilated, empty, suffering frequent flashbacks, nightmares, dissociative moments, and also, revoltingly, pining for him, or pining for some illusion of comfort and safety and care and love he conjured in me as my therapist. Oh god, it is so awful, truly, when I think about it, which is every day, for long periods during every day, for months on end. The worst, in some ways, are the unwelcome, unpredictable, moments of pining, which make me nauseated and fill me with deep, deep shame. My mind is obsessed with what happened because I cannot make sense of it, I do not understand it, I do not understand my self during it (or after), I struggle, even now, after many hours of therapy (with a good therapist) and obscene hours of thinking about it, to understand or feel any sort of clarity about what happened to me except that this man, a monster, a true monster, took control of me slowly over time using his access to me and my trust and all of my most personal fears and moments, and then used me as something akin to a sex doll for months on end. As I said, it was an annihilating experience. If someone said, "I was raped by my therapist," I would have had some somewhat straightforwardly fraught and horrible event in mind. But the reality is far more complicated and in that way, perhaps more terrible, at least for me, than I would have ever imagined. I have to think this is true of so much abuse, that is an unimaginable human experience unless you have the misfortune of enduring it. Thank you Mary for capturing the complexity of this unfortunate part of the human experience.
I really feel for you. Especially this: "My mind is obsessed with what happened because I cannot make sense of it." That is the most terrible and bewildering feeling. I want to say "I'm sorry" but its so inadequate. I am glad if the story helped even a little. I know it helps me sometimes to see certain things represented clearly. So glad if I could do that, it was part of my motive for writing it. I wish you the best.
Mary, thank you for your reply and for your kind words. In the wake of this catastrophe, I have almost compulsively searched for art that can help me understand what happened to me and make me feel a little less alone.
I have a long list of pieces that captured, in one way or another, a piece of my experience and were helpful, among them William Faulkner's Sanctuary, Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive, Nastassja Martin's In the Eye of the Wild, Olivia Wilde's (in my opinion unfairly derided) Don't Worry Darling and Dorothea Tanning's painting Musical Chairs. The list is much longer than this, and now it includes Minority Report. Young Debby's return to Ned's office despite his abuse, and then her return to him a lifetime later to confront him, and his multifaceted, still-predatory, extraordinarily narcissistic response to her (and her physical attack on him), all rang true to me.
I have not confronted my abuser, and will not as I am extremely afraid of him. As I said, he is a monster, and I feel uncertain what he is capable of doing. I have, however, thought often about what it would be like to see him again and confront him with what he did to me, and to ask why he did it and to tell him how vile and evil he is. I would guess this sort of confrontation would be immensely unrewarding, to be honest, as I think he would behave similarly to Ned, with a lot of self-pity, excuses and perhaps a wolfish hope that he could get me back on his couch again.
So, with my own confrontation off the table, I found reading about Debby's confrontation with Ned cathartic. It was validating somehow. I also think you captured the way these experiences shape a person's future and haunts their present in the form of often banal dreams. All of this is true of me. Anyway, I am rambling. I just want to say that your story captured something very true for me, I saw something of myself reflected in it, and in that way, it helped me a little bit to understand myself, which is a rare gift indeed.
I will add that I expected to add the movie Women Talking to this list, but it left me cold. I am an N of 1, but the movie struck me as false, somehow, in that I do not think the women, having had their world turned upside down, would then debate calmly and clearly what to do. They learned the men in their lives had betrayed them in the most horrific way, that their entire worldview was shaky, and that they could not trust the very foundation of their social order. I would imagine they would be in utter shock. How could they possibly process this so quickly? In a matter of days? Ridiculous. I would imagine many of them would refuse to believe it, would cling to the old lies ferociously because the truth is so horrible and hard to accept. Women Talking was an academic debate set in a hayloft, not a reflection of real life, in my opinion.
I would also love to know from Maggie Gyllenhaal’s perspective whether her view of the character has evolved now that she’s a director and has stated how she feels that the female gaze on stories is different since Secretary was directed by a man.
I would be interested in that too.
. . . interesting
Mary, you are one of my favorite authors. The way you write each character with such tenderness, no matter their "perversions"; and you are never a tourist about their perversions. Two Girls, Fat and Thin, was so masterful...never did I think I could feel empathy for someone who loves (someone I assume is meant to be) Ayn Rand. But I cried for Dorothy and loved her.
I too have "the thing." I don't know where it came from - I spent years in therapy trying to figure out what terrible thing must have happened to me to create it. I have no answers. I don't know why my fiercest wish since 13 was to be preyed upon and discarded cruelly.
I spent my late teens, 20s, and 30s chasing _the thing_. I ran headlong into relationships with older men who I thought could give it to me.
"Frank: But you’ve been with older men before?
Zoe: Yes…
Frank: Then you know they hurt you? And after they hurt you, they discard you.
Zoe: You can’t hurt me"
And like the quotation, I was hurt and discarded - just like I had hoped I would be. I stopped chasing the thing about 5 years ago after being so carelessly dashed against the rocks I didn't think I could survive it.
I appreciate the distinction you make here between the character in your short story and the one in the movie. In my late teens and early 20s I was too young, without a fully-formed mind, and no adult man should have taken advantage of that but they did. I don't know why I relate so hard to Winter Mama when it's not the same thing at all.
When I saw your name in this month's New Yorker I sat down immediately and read it, about an hour ago. When I saw "I like dull work" I felt my heart race and my ears ring.
Thank you for writing this story. I don't want to spoil the story for anyone, so that's all I'll say. I've been sitting here crying and I went to find you online to tell you how much this story meant to me.
Thank *you* for replying to my writing. Especially Two Girls. I had very little idea what I was doing when I wrote that--perhaps like one has no idea what they are doing when they chase "the thing?"--so I'm amazed at how well it turned out. I wish I could understand better than you but I probably don't. "Masochism" must be part of it, but somehow that concept seems too simple even if its deep. I don't want to start babbling here! But I hope you one day catch the right "thing."
I think that is why I had such trouble reading BAD BEHAVIOR as opposed to later books. I think the characters suffering is too potent for me to breathe through. I am so conscious of it that it hurts and it feels like self-harm almost. I feel like this cycle of this particular behavior is so massive and repetitive that it makes it hard for me to feel indifferent about, get out of bed in morning. And the whole victimization/victimology/experiencer themself has been so picked apart that there's almost nothing left of the original event. Ohhhh Mary, this is the hard stuff. How do you go there? How did you get (t)here?
I don't know how I got there. Secretary is a painful story but I don't feel that way about every story in BB. Even Secretary in my mind has some humor and there's goodness in the character who is, as I said in the piece, honest and dignified about what is happening throughout. But I know a lot of people feel as you do, or did. But given how you feel, I'm glad you were willing to give my other books a chance.
Well I feel it in a kind of ironic sense. In the sense that the honesty was so piercing that it kind of hurts. But hurt is good and leads to something special.
I meant character from each story. Even though that is what I try to do in my fiction, it was hard having it reflected back at me. Proust called this "reciprocal torture" & Virginal Woolf, "looking glass shame".
Good grief! Not trying to torture anybody!
It's not y(our) job to comfort me.
This is that Capitalistic symptom that we simply cannot get away from. Sex as commodity. Sensuality as commodity.
Your observation of why readers (and Hollywood) thinks we need uplifting endings is so clear. You say, "I think we remain deeply discomfited by victims unless their victimization is clear-cut and looks like it might be remedied by rational, socially mandated action. What goes on inside Debby does not fit into that category.” The sad discomfort in both stories, Secretary and Minority Report, are what make them feel so “true.” Such pathos in familiar, mundane details. Hoping to see a movie version of Minority Report!
Charlie Kaufman is very troubled by that. You can see that in his films.
Secretary is such a masterpiece. I can think of it cinematically (I have not seen the movie) as I read it, the scenes are vivid. It is as you said, a language story, difficult to translate into film. Like trying to make a film of that Kate Chopin story where a woman imagines life without her husband. I forget that title. Now I'll have to watch the movie. Thanks for this.
I read the story and then saw the film and had a bad reaction to it which I later realized was my expectations running closer to the story than to the edgy sexy romp the film was trying to be. My friends loved it and it is a clever film, but I appreciate your resurrecting Debby, because her story resonates with many and deserves to be honestly told.
Dear Mary, thank you for writing with this special point of view. Your "camera" is always perfectly focused on the most nuanced events. This is the greatest talent of your writing. I am an Italian journalist, I wrote an article on Minority Report in the newspaper Il Foglio. How can I send you it?
As a former teacher of "Expository Writing" that focused specifically on fiction, I'm sorry I never had the chance to assign "Secretary" and "Minority Report" as a contrast and compare regarding artistic choices -- with extra credit for referencing all the related Gaitskill essays and substacks as well as the New Yorker online feature about revisiting "Secretary" -- and extra extra credit for discussing Freudian theories of erotic masochism.
Do you like Haiku, Mary? Do you think it's cheap and unremarkable? Substance-less?
I don't have strong opinions about Haiku, I don't feel I understand it very well as an art form. But no I don't think its cheap, etc. I don't know why anyone would think that about a whole form of poetry.
I liked this Haiku a lot I ran into a while ago:
Waving back
at the poppy fields
the retarded child
I like it too! And it would completely fuck it up if you had to say developmentally disabled child.
Precisely.
It's just so short. I find that when I'm especially fatigued it's the best I can do but I don't feel like my Reader is satisfied by something so small.