On this month’s Fiction Podcast, Jennifer Egan reads Mary Gaitskill’s story “The Other Place,” which explores the consciousness of a man who fantasizes about hurting women and worries that his son has inherited his obsession. Egan says that she was “eager to revisit” the story because of the way it conveys “a feeling of intense menace, but mixed with a lot of other complicated humanity, specifically parenthood, and, I think, too, the feeling of redemption that somehow Mary Gaitskill managed to wrest from this very dark and threatening situation.”
As a youth, the narrator of the story tried to act on his fantasies, pursuing situations where he could feel what he called “the other place” “running against the membrane of the world, almost touching it.” When, as an adult, he sees that his son shares his dark fascination, it takes him back to his past. The narrator’s humanity is apparent, despite his horrifying preoccupation. “I love that Gaitskill is willing to make this happen,” Egan says. “More than anything I’ve read, I feel like she created a bridge for me into a point of view from which this sort of behavior makes sense. And that is the incredible feat that fiction can perform when it’s done at the highest level.”
You can hear Egan read “The Other Place” and discuss it with the magazine’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, by listening above or by downloading the podcast from the iTunes store.
