Thoughts (and Feelings) on The Mare

Reflections on the best book I read last year

One fall evening in my senior year of college, I walked with Mary Gaitskill, just the two of us, for eighteen whole minutes, the time it took to get from campus to her hotel. If reading this sentence didn’t spur any particular jealousies or associations, you possibly haven’t heard of Gaitskill and probably haven’t read her. Back then, I hadn’t read her either. The opportunity to take our walk, which should have felt like being handed one of Willy Wonka’s golden tickets, felt like an obligation, more like being handed a parcel that isn’t for you and told to deliver it promptly. I would log those eighteen minutes and get paid for them as part of my work study; this was my responsibility as a Writing Center fellow.

The thinking part of me knew that Gaitskill was a big deal and one of the more famous writers who had come to teach a master class at my school, but the feeling part was wrapped up in my thesis, an original television pilot and series bible, and I didn’t make time even to pick up a Gaitskill short story in preparation for her visit. I remember asking what I hoped were insightful questions about teaching and the state of fiction as we walked, but I’ll admit I don’t recall much of what she said about these things. Soon, Gaitskill was gone from campus and time clanged past.

In the intervening years, I’ve sometimes added new writers to my pantheon, to the panel of people I extol as minor gods, and have occasionally removed them. One must reach a high bar to qualify for this distinction and loving a particular book by someone is not sufficient, or my list might include Susie Boyt, Alice Adams, Denis Johnson, Tobias Wolff, Elif Batuman, Margaret Atwood, John Williams, and a few others. At the start of 2024, my fiction pantheon comprised just three individuals: Christine Schutt, George Saunders, and Kazuo Ishiguro. Now, it also includes Mary Gaitskill.

I began in June with Gaitskill’s first book, Bad Behavior, a collection of short stories that wouldn’t raise eyebrows today but which were understandably transgressive in 1988 for their non-judgmental depictions of BDSM dynamics and sex work. Months later, I flew through a second collection entitled Don’t Cry (“Mirrorball” struck me in particular, and I rail against the reviewer who said it “relies on an intellectual conceit that cannot ultimately save the story from its length or disorganization”). I then devoured National Book Award finalist Veronica, and the slim but potent This is Pleasure, one of the most nuanced pieces of storytelling I’ve encountered in conversation with #MeToo (see also, Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You).

In all of these texts, Gaitskill writes about complicated sex/power dynamics in a way which isn’t always pretty or edifying but always feels like how people really are, like she understands the weirdness of being a human with desires and is willing to get really close to all that mess on the page, closer than most writers seem to dare, and to empathize with everyone involved while having zero tolerance for bullshit, a winning combination. It’s worth noting that Gaitskill has spoken in interviews about being a teenage runaway and working for a time as a prostitute and a stripper, so we may assume she is not writing about worlds entirely foreign to her.

At this point, I was firmly pro-Gaitskill but not yet a true acolyte. Then in November I read The Mare and two things happened. First, I became deeply frustrated with my former self. I wished I could reach back in time and shake senior year me by the shoulders like, Hello! She is a Rare One who Really Understands and you have an audience with her! Do not squander it! The second thing was more unexpected. I felt an almost physical urge to write about the book, in a way that fully activated and merged my student, writer, reader, and feeler selves. After years of writing narratives, I suddenly wanted to write an analytical essay, was buzzing with the ideas I might present in such a package. Write the thing! a voice said.

I called a friend who’d read The Mare and we discussed it. Right off the bat, she said something like, “This book didn’t sound good to me. I wasn’t excited to read a horse book, and if a different Gaitskill had been available on Libby I wouldn’t have read this one. Also, it’s insane that a middle-aged white woman dared to write this and pulled it off.” I agreed. We spoke for over an hour, discovering that we'd been struck by completely different aspects of the text, yet agreeing that the patterns we each saw were very present, that the book contained a richness worthy of inclusion in canon and curricula. It felt like I was back in English class, which has always been one of my very favorite places. It even, for a time, quelled my need to write this. But here we are.

The Mare, published in 2015, tells the story of Velveteen Vargas, called Velvet, an impoverished Dominican tween living in Brooklyn who bonds with a difficult horse named Fugly Girl. Velvet encounters the titular mare during her stays in Upstate New York with a well-off white woman, an artist and former alcoholic named Ginger, and her husband Paul. This arrangement is facilitated by the Fresh Air Fund, a real nonprofit; Gaitskill herself hosted children through the organization. The novel is written entirely in the first person, alternating between Velvet and Ginger’s perspectives with occasional other voices including Paul, Velvet’s mother, and Velvet’s riding instructor. If this description doesn’t make you want to pick up the book, I understand, but bear with me as I attempt to pin down why it so resonated.

What struck me most in The Mare is Gaitskill's unique handling of the relationship between one's own interiority/emotions, the physical world, other beings, and the various ways we communicate — and the important truths she thus reveals about existing as an emotive being bumping up against other emotive beings (as one does). At its core, The Mare is a book which seems to say, we’re all just responsive animals experiencing the complex but very present currents of feeling within and between our bodies, seeking connection or control.

We’re all just responsive animals

There’s a sort of directness, almost a simplicity, in the way we typically characterize animals’ responses to stimuli (think fight or flight, survival instincts, etc). Gaitskill seems to be saying, well, we’re all kind of like this, though, aren’t we? Sure, you may have a large, highly developed brain, but don’t forget you’re still a creature, responsive and intuitive and readable in all of the creaturely ways. This is foregrounded through Gaitskill’s choice to describe human-human and human-animal interactions in the same terms throughout the book; there is no shift in the tenor or language patterns which delineate people from four legged beasts. Both Gaitskill’s horses and humans emote, often in deeply embodied ways, picking up each other’s signals in a manner which feels immediate and creature-forward. The novel doesn’t simply suggest that humans and animals are the same but rather that we are all markedly animal, all subject to basic drives and feelings, things like fear, hunger, desire for connection. We see this common, cross-species vernacular in a scene where Beverly, a notably strict trainer at Velvet’s stable, struggles to control a horse named Joker.

That was the time when Joker bucked off Beverly. She was in the round pen working with him on his “manners,” and as soon as I saw them I could see they were not getting along. I could see it in Joker's skin, in the way his body was under Beverly's legs and in the things Beverly was saying without words, angry things she said with her legs and her hands. I had the funny feeling she didn't even know what she was saying, but I could see it and I know he felt it.

In this passage, Velvet observes the ripples of feeling through both horse and human body, reading each loud and clear despite the exchange’s entirely nonverbal nature. Other times, Gaitskill writes dialogue for the horses, most often giving voice to Fugly Girl in the chapters told from Velvet’s perspective, as in the lines below.

She said, Touch me, and I put my hands in through the bars and put them on her head to stop her from bobbing it. I told her I'd let her out one day, I promised. She started to swing her head like she was upset, but she stopped just short. I promise. She wanted to believe me. But her wrinkled mouth said, I can't.

By giving both the horses and humans moments of verbal and nonverbal expression, Gaitskill writes in a sort of universal language of feeling that transcends traditional communicative boundaries and divisions between species. Her approach emphasizes the way emotion and meaning flow through multiple channels at once - words, bodies, intonation, the quality of a gesture or a silence - creating a manifold but inevitable transmission.

Experiencing the complex but very present currents of feeling

So much of the beauty of The Mare comes from how Gaitskill handles the ever-present emotional terrain that exists both within and between us, a space that operates below (or perhaps beside) language. The way she writes makes me want to describe this space almost like a soup we're all collectively swimming in, a shared feeling-substance that ripples and transmits between beings, whether we acknowledge it or not. This terrain is often confusing, layered, and resistant to explanation. For this reason, many writers seem to simplify or ignore large swathes of it. Gaitskill does not. Instead, she develops her own descriptive language patterns in order to reach around the big, unwieldy, complex feelings that balk at categorization, finding words that are able to hold all of that bigness, unwieldiness, complexity.

So how does Gaitskill do this? She lets the indefinitude exist. One notable move is her frequent use of the verb “felt” and the noun “something” to describe an experience, modified by clarifying phrases. She does not resist, as many writers might, the seeming imprecision of a “something” and force a more concrete but less authentic description. It is as if she is saying, there’s a there there. It’s hard to pin down, but it’s certainly present, so let me tell you what this something feels like. In every instance where she does this, I was left with a visceral understanding of what was unfolding emotionally, more so than if it had been described in neat, definitive terms. Take, for example, two different passages below, where Fugly Girl (sometimes called Fiery Girl) is resisting certain demands made of her by Velvet.

Fiery Girl came out with her head up and ears forward; when she saw the trailer, her neck got stiff and she pulled on the chain. I put my hand on her neck; there was something in her I hadn't felt before, something little and hurt, too hurt to be bad. I tried to find it with my hand, and talked to it soft. “Just come with me," I said, "like before.”

We walked on this piece of shiny tarp that Pat brought out. She didn't want to. I had to make her, gently. It sounds boring, but it wasn't. Because I felt her through the line, at first just her normal mouth-self and then something that was soft and round and just starting not to be afraid.

What is it like to be a large, scared, connection-seeking creature? What is it like to come into contact with one? These kinds of questions may seem easy to answer or dumb to ask; they’re not either of these things and Gaitskill knows that. In the first quotation, Velvet feels the “something” in Fugly Girl which she “hadn’t felt before,” then pins this down further as “something little and hurt.” In the second quotation, Velvet “felt her” and what she feels from the horse is “something that was soft and round and just starting not to be afraid.” These aren’t typical descriptions. Gaitskill’s word choice could even be called vague, and a pedantic English teacher might demand edits of a student writing in this matter, yet I would argue that the meaning that comes across in her prose is very specific. There is almost a magic in the way Gaitskill uses the word “something” to illuminate our lumpy darknesses, in her willingness to sit in and report on the feeling-substance we’re all wading through.

We see this technique throughout the book, as when Velvet receives her first Christmas present from Ginger: “It was more beautiful than anything I ever had. It made my blood run faster, like something too fast for me to hold.” And when Velvet encounters her crush at a party: “We weren’t moving but I felt something come from him to me, heavy and delicious. I looked at him from the bottom of me; something came up in me and met him strong.” Notice also how Gaitskill’s language makes these currents of emotion almost tangible. They have a force, a physicality, sometimes even a precise location or a direction (“I felt something come from him to me”). I wish more writers would slow down, look (feel?) more closely, and give us readers this flavor of information about their characters so we could see and feel them more clearly in turn.

Another move Gaitskill makes involves using descriptions that come across as illogical on a literal level but powerfully evoke a character’s felt experience. Of course, other authors do this too — figurative description is not Gaitskill’s invention — though her brand of nonliteral language is distinctive. Unlike writers such as Proust or Ishiguro, who frequently use this kind of language to ruminate on the past or spiral off into memory, Gaitskill largely remains rooted in the immediate present, her metaphors capturing how emotions manifest in real time. And unlike writers like Woolf or Faulkner, whose figurative language can skew philosophical, abstract, and internal, Gaitskill remains in the realm of embodied experience, staying with a character’s feelings rather than shifting into cerebral analysis. The emotions she focuses on move within bodies and spaces instead of simply twisting about in someone’s brain. Finally, in contrast with countless other novelists, Gaitskill’s descriptions across The Mare are always anchored in a character’s subjectivity and never purely decorative or atmospheric. If she describes a setting in a poetic way, the specifics of the poetry will directly emerge from the feelings of the character witnessing the setting. Take, for example, the moment below, where Velvet sees another kid from the Fresh Air Fund at a restaurant.

Then we sat down and I saw there was an African-American girl about my age with a white family. I tried to get her to look at me, but she wouldn't. The white mother was smiling and passing the girl food, but the white kids weren't really talking to her and the air around her was alone.

Here and elsewhere, Gaitskill elucidates a common experience (in this case, a sort of loneliness) through unconventional language that is deeply rooted in Velvet’s unfolding feelings, feelings that express themselves in the space around the girl that she observes. From a different writer, we might expect “the air around her was empty” but that isn’t quite it and Gaitskill doesn’t settle. Though in an objective sense, there is no such thing as “alone air,” there also totally is. I can think of times at full dinner tables or crowded parties when the air around me was alone; I understand what Velvet means, how she felt and how she imagined the other girl felt, and I would guess that, reading the sentence, you do too.

Within and between our bodies

Per Gaitskill’s logics, we are all gently simmering in the emotional soup and attuned to its currents, to the myriad ripples across its terrains, whether consciously or not. We feel when emotions shift and flow within ourselves. Likewise, those we come into contact with feel the things we communicate to them, no matter the channels (verbal, nonverbal) or the volition (intentional, unintentional). It’s like we’re all standing in the same swimming pool of feelings, and if one person jabs their arm into the water at one end, the people all the way at the other end will feel that ripple.

We see a nonverbal, unintentional transmission in Velvet’s witnessing of an ever-present, underlying sorrow within Ginger: "There was the crying in Gingers face all the time, and she didn't even know it was there because if l asked her why she was sad she would say, 'I'm not sad.'" Here, and in many other places throughout the text, the emotional truth shines through, sometimes revealing a disconnect between what is being overtly expressed and what is being unconsciously conveyed. While multiple characters notice this kind of mismatch, Velvet is the most attentive reader of these currents of feeling. In the chapters she narrates, her voice throws into relief what others might only unconsciously register.

Velvet’s narration also crystallizes the ways that feelings permeate physical reality, as in the following passage where she creeps out of bed and strains to hear Ginger and Paul talking about her while they clean the kitchen:

There were dish sounds and water running, which didn’t sound mad, and I thought that if they were really mad, I would hear it in the dishes: they would bang them around like when my mom is mad, when she’s mad, even the water runs mad.

Velvet’s mother’s anger likely takes many forms, the banging of dishes perhaps accompanied by yelling, tense brows, a hostile posture. But however the intricate alchemy of her fury manifests, the emotional terrain is so starkly felt that “even the water runs mad.” This moment demonstrates both the ways that emotion makes itself apparent physically, as well as the fact that the particular avenues of communication matter less than the fundamental exchange that occurs. When creatures interact, feeling will get through, whooshing from one being to another along a complex braid of linguistic and somatic conduits.

We perhaps see this most clearly when Beverly explains the power of cursing to Velvet, almost as if Gaitskill is explaining to us that feeling suffuses whatever vessel carries it:

“I know you're not supposed to curse,” she said. “But when you need a horse to back off and settle down, it helps if you say curse words. You make your voice deep and say curse words. Not because they understand the words, but because your voice will right away say those words different. And he'll know you mean it.”

What Beverly, and Gaitskill, are saying is that emotion can, and will, speak for itself through any mouthpiece. A curse feels sharp and powerful because it is; it has a curse-valence that’s very different from a compliment-valence. A horse can understand a curse the same way that you could probably tell if someone cursed at you in a foreign language.

Seeking connection or control

It is my firm belief that most artists return to the same two or three core concerns for their entire artistic lives. This doesn’t mean that all of an individual’s art will look or feel the same (though it sometimes does), but rather that it will all have a certain stamp or signature signaling themness, that underneath the variations in form and content, the work could be distilled into something produced by someone who cares deeply/thinks deeply about x. I have found that it is very, very rare that anyone has more than three x’s. I probably have two. One of Mary Gaitskill’s is certainly the tangled intersection of intimacy and power, how and why we seek to connect with and control each other, sometimes both at once. Because The Mare is ostensibly a horse book and its focus is not primarily, or even secondarily, sexual dynamics, many critics have described it as somewhat of a departure from Gaitskill’s other work. I disagree. The novel is intensely Gaitskillian, exploring the same fundamental concern with connection and power as all of her other works, just this time outside of the bedroom. Take, for example, the passage below, where Velvet watches horse trainer Beverly use a whip on the animals.

She did not hit the horses hard, but still you could feel how big that whip was. You could feel something else too, something big and oily in the air around her when she used it. I realized then what she’d meant when she talked about controlling them from inside. When I was on Joker, I could feel something psychological happen inside him, like he was mixed-up and didn't know which way to go. It wasn't the whip. He understood the whip. It was the something else, and I had to use my legs not just to stay on but to tell him, It's okay, you're okay. It made me feel like I was riding against Beverly, even if she was the one teaching me to ride.

This paragraph contains many of the aspects described in the sections above (the use of “feel” and “something” to get at emotional terrain, the mixture of verbal and nonverbal conduits along which the feelings manifest, the way the layered communication is understood clearly by Velvet, the figurative description of the “oily” air), but observe also how the text crackles with the very alive power/connection dynamics running through it. Beverly desires domination over the horses, Joker is mixed-up in response to the psychological control mechanism that’s related to but separate from the lash of the whip, and Velvet feels an against-ness toward Beverly in response to what she’s witnessing and tries to use her legs to connect with the horse and calm him. This is Gaitskill’s bread and butter. The interplay of physical and psychological dominance and the power exchanges and flashes of intimacy are no less typical of her work because they play out in a story centered on a girl riding horses rather than one centered on a sexual relationship.

Throughout the book, Gaitskill’s laying bare of the feeling-space between and within creatures exposes the underlying mechanisms through which we attempt connection and control and the ways that embodied emotional signals, both those transmitted and received, function in these attempts. Sometimes characters’ efforts are more explicit, as when Velvet’s mother works to maintain power over Velvet or Velvet seeks to connect with her crush. Other times they bubble beneath the surface, as when the girls in Velvet’s class exercise power within the school’s social scene or Ginger tries to connect with her husband Paul. The stable is particularly fertile ground for these dynamics, in all of their shades, because in horsemanship (as more subtly in other arenas of life) domination and connection are inextricably linked. The horse trainers and riders are always, to some degree, engaged in a power struggle with the horses, asserting dominance and fighting to enforce the following of their commands. Yet they must also connect with the animals in order to be listened to, understood, rewarded by a deeper bond with these creatures.

Velvet throws this dualism into relief. Her continuous struggle to control Fugly Girl is accompanied by an equally forceful parallel effort to connect with her, to physically and metaphorically eliminate the distance between them, almost to merge selves with the animal as in the lines that follow.

I got her to the mounting block and worked to make the girth right, over and over thinking, Beg a mare, beg a mare [...] and then wind came through the arena, and she spooked [...] She came back down and I was ready, I turned her hard, right into my thigh. We went forward again, walking, trotting, walking. Each feeling where the other was, except it kept moving and changing. Was this what Pat meant by begging? Because that's not what it was, it was like finding—no, not that either. It was—I tried to think what it was so hard that my mind grew like a forest with everything in it: my mom and Dante and school and Dominic's eyes, Shawn's hands, Strawberry so close in the closet; Ginger [...] The forest closed up and I was just on my mare and for a long moment, I found her.

Velvet is dealing with a large, often unpredictable animal, and in order to ride safely, it’s important for her to be able to effectively command the creature, as she does when she turns Fugly Girl hard after the mare spooks. But to become a truly great rider, one who can move seamlessly with her horse, Velvet must form a close relationship with the animal, too. Of course, since this is Gaitskill we’re talking about, the dynamic is never as simple as a unilateral power transfer. Velvet is both dominating the mare and almost begging for its cooperation. The mare is both submitting to Velvet and brimming with blatant force. The deep trust and connection between them seems key to the sustenance of this two-way balance. I find it very beautiful and, given her oeuvre, quite expected that Gaitkill doesn’t flatten this complexity or sand down its contradictory edges. The full nuanced picture of what happens during moments just like these – emotionally, somatically, energetically – seems to be one of the things Gaitskill is interested in most as an artist, and I thank her for it.

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A note on the writing of this piece: I drafted this post before my first one, breaking a many-year spell of never writing essays. I wrote the first half in what felt like a fugue state over many consecutive hours, and the rest I finished in bursts of similarly fugue-ish energy, usually from my bed, which helpfully did away with the myth that I can only write in coffee shops. Though I knew what I wanted to say , I didn’t realize how many words it would take to say it, and I initially envisioned this as the longest in a series of brief entries about the books I read in 2024 within a larger piece shaped sort of like Indefensible Expectations’ book lists from 2020 and 2021. Perhaps I will write some such list in the future, but this essay became its own thing and I’m glad it did. To use a Gaitskillian description, getting these words on the page felt like something big and urgent and becoming and ready, and I hope to keep writing in that same spirit. Lastly, if anything in here resonated with you or made you want to pick up the book, please tell me.