One evening, she got a call from an agent who'd read her stories. He said, "I'm really excited about this collection."

She replied, "Everybody hates it."
He said, "What do you mean?"
"I've sent it to people, and they hate it."
"I don't hate it."
"Can you call me back? I'm eating breakfast."

It was five o'clock in the evening, and Gaitskill didn't explain that she worked nights. The agent later told her it was the strangest phone call he'd ever had.

Nonetheless, he sold the stories -- not one by one, to magazines, as Gaitskill had dared to hope, but as a book. Bad Behavior appeared in 1988, and Gaitskill expected it to be ignored.

It wasn't. No less than the New York Times's Michiko Kakutani praised Gaitskill's "radar-perfect detail" and "repertorial candor, uncompromised by sentimentality or voyeuristic charm." Other reviewers heaped similar praises, and Gaitskill was cast as a member of the literary brat pack, the S&M contemporary of Bret Easton Ellis and Tama Janowitz, one of the new "extreme" or "transgressive" writers, a la A.M. Homes or William Vollman. Timing, Gaitskill thinks, was crucial: "I have a feeling that if I'd published three years earlier, I wouldn't have done as well."

In New York, strangers occasionally recognized her on the street. And people began to respond to her as a famous person: "Before, I'd always been awkward socially," says Gaitskill. "At parties, I was the retard standing in the corner. But suddenly, people expected me to say witty, ironic things."

Gaitskill admitted that much of Bad Behavior was autobiographical, and the literary world couldn't help but wonder what was "real" and what wasn't. After all, Bad Behavior was bracing even by New York standards. In it, a young secretary allows her boss to spank her and masturbate on her; an S&M tryst fizzles; and prostitutes navigate complicated relationships with their middle-class johns.

At first, she enjoyed the book's reception, took it as a confirmation that she wasn't weird, that she was, in fact, a writer. But a sense of exposure began to gnaw at her. Reading reviews and doing interviews jarred her. Her very personal stories were suddenly available in mass-market paperback. The feeling, she says, was of "letting the whole world into you."

She began having health problems. Loud noises made her jump. On a book tour, to support her paperback, she visited San Francisco, and someone drove her out to Marin County. Somehow, it suited her -- a quieter, softer place than New York -- and she took an apartment there. "Everything slowed," she says. "I didn't talk to anybody."

She taught writing classes here and there, and finished her first novel: Two Girls, Fat and Thin. In it, Gaitskill examined the parallel lives of two loners, the fat one a downtrodden disciple of an Ayn Rand-like rationalist, the thin one a journalist with a taste for S&M. The book was published in 1991, and met with mixed reviews. The novel "does not uniformly succeed in conventional terms," wrote novelist/reviewer Jane Smiley, though she allowed that Gaitskill had, perhaps unintentionally, drawn "a potent picture of an America that is the nightmare version of the America promoted by advertising."

This time around, the spotlight was less glaring. Interviewers tended to ask Gaitskill about the book, rather than her old-news personal history. But sometimes, at readings, audience members would try to divine the precise dividing point between Gaitskill's personal and private life. "What kind of person are you anyway?" they asked. "You're not fat and you're not thin. Who are you? Do you do all that stuff in the book?"

She moved to San Francisco, the setting for much of Because They Wanted To. The city, she says, was too cute. "And parades! I've never seen a city with so many parades! 'Now you can see what our sexuality is all about, as if you've somehow managed to miss it.' " She noticed that San Francisco seemed to be populated entirely by the very old and the very young, but hardly anyone her own age.

Last August, a teaching job at the University of Houston's Creative Writing Program brought her to Texas. The money wasn't great -- Gaitskill says she doesn't own a car because she can't afford one -- but for a fiction writer, it was significant. Teaching leaves Gaitskill too drained to write, and the year-long commitment to UH felt significant. But, she says, if the university asks her to extend her stay, she will. She admits that there's a "real limit" to what anyone can teach a would-be writer; the best she can hope, she says, is to "open a door" to her students.