Literary Friction - Complicated Love with Mary Gaitskill

Literary Friction

Arts

4.9 • 593 Ratings

🗓️ 6 November 2020

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What does it mean to love too much, or in a way that society doesn’t see as appropriate? Is loving an inherently complicated experience? Helping us consider these questions is our guest, the author Mary Gaitskill, who joined us to talk about her masterful long essay Lost Cat, which has just been published in the UK for the first time. It’s the story of her lost cat, Gattino, and also a clear-eyed and heartbreaking meditation on who we are allowed to love, how different kinds of suffering are connected, and the hope and pain that love can bring. Inspired by Gattino and Mary, the theme of today’s show is ‘Complicated Love’, and we’ll be looking at its joys and perils in books from Romeo and Juliet to Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. Listen in for our interview with Mary Gaitskill, thoughts about the whys and wherefores of how love gets complicated in literature, and all our usual recommendations. Recommendations on the theme, Complicated Love: Octavia: The Pisces by Melissa Broder https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-pisces-9781408890981/ Carrie: Middlemarch by George Eliot https://www.gutenberg.org/files/145/145-h/145-h.htm General Recommendations: Octavia: Hot Milk by Deborah Levy https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2016/hot-milk-by-deborah-levy/ Mary: Snow by Orhan Pamuk https://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/title/snow/author/orhan-pamuk/ Carrie: Beloved by Toni Morrison https://bookshop.org/books/beloved/9781400033416 Email us: litfriction@gmail.com Tweet us & find us on Instagram: @litfriction

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Literary Friction.
0:15.4	I'm Carrie Plitt and I'm here in Oxford, together but apart from my co-host Octavia Bright, whose lovely face I am staring at on a screen right now.
0:25.3	Hi, Octavia.
0:26.2	Hi, Carrie.
0:27.4	How are you doing?
0:29.3	Well, I don't know.
0:32.6	I'm all right.
0:33.2	I'm jacked up on caffeine and I'm a little bit high from spending a few hours in the Rose
0:37.9	Garden at Regent's Park earlier today, which was wonderful, but I'm also in my house again
0:45.3	and crawling up the walls a little bit. So, you know, it's 50, 50, isn't it? But the Rose
0:49.5	Garden was amazing and it was like, oh, walking through these flowers and they're all still out even though it's
0:56.6	autumn and even though the light was grey like the colours seemed to glow even brighter and then
1:01.9	the best thing about it was that they all have these amazing names like free spirit and you're
1:07.4	gorgeous and hello beautiful and they're all written on these plucks so you can see
1:11.6	which Rose is which so you kind of walk around and you get these really affirming sentences
1:15.3	kind of thrown at you. It's very cheesy. It is incredibly cheesy. A rose called Hello
1:21.4	Beautiful. Hello beautiful. There's also yeah there's they're all there's one called rock and roll. I don't know. Oh my God. Yeah, it's very cheesy. But listen, it worked for me. It worked for me today. That's how much I need it. I do like roses. That's nice. Well, you don't have to pretend. I mean, you shut that down. No, I do. I got very into the roses in our garden this year. How are you? Yeah, I'm equally
1:47.4	kind of confused. I'm very happy to be chatting to you right now. It's a good activity for the
1:53.2	evening. I'm surprised you've had so much caffeine this late in the day. Girl, I don't know what
1:57.4	happened to me. I lost it slightly and just, yeah, went for it. Feels great.
2:02.6	I approve. It's funny, we always put, when I write the script of this introduction, I always put three big exes to kind of like where we're going to say how we are. And I looked at it today and I was like, I feel a bit three big exes right now, like not in the adult porn context and not really in the kissing context, but in the like a blank script or like moonshine from.
2:33.9	I'll call it
	...

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