"Gaitskill isn’t scary because she conjures monsters;
monsters, she points out, are almost always in fashion.
What makes her scary, and what makes her exciting,
is her ability to evoke the hidden life, the life unseen,
the life we don’t even know we are living. The critic
Greil Marcus, a champion of her work, calls her a
descendant of Nathaniel Hawthorne."
— "Mary Gaitskill and the Life Unseen,"
by Parul Sehgal