Basic Behavior​

During the summer of 2022, a troubling suspicion began to take root in my mind. It was June, and ever since I’d left my news blogging job the previous year, the compulsion I’d once felt to stand stalwart and hypnotized at the gates of global content mills — which for some time had been as much a matter of personal curiosity as professional necessity — had eased considerably. I went on walks instead, and began to forget the cackling cadence of New York Post headlines. My friends seemed to appreciate filling me in. The Depp v. Heard trial, which once I would have not so much monitored as melted down, sifted for odd parts, and reconstituted as a dozen miniscule pieces of writing, barely registered. Then I started receiving emails about the trial from, of all people, Mary Gaitskill: the novelist, essayist, and short-story writer whose work I much revere and had often returned to during that recently departed decade, my twenties, when I was writing those miniscule articles, sensing powerfully the expectations and opinions of others, forming brief, enigmatic friendships with women I met through work — in short, exhibiting some classic Gaitskill-character behavior.