Mary Gaitskill has lived a lot of lives. She burst onto the literary scene in 1988 with the aptly named Bad Behavior, a startling collection of stories that broke taboos without breaking stride. Gaitskill wrote with invigorating honesty about masochists, Dexedrine addicts, and prostitutes, finding a weird beauty in their unsensational, everyday lives.

Next came her novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin, whose themes of incest and bondage cemented Gaitskill's reputation as a literary Bad Girl, and the acclaimed story collection Because They Wanted To. Last year, her long-awaited novel Veronica met with glowing reviews and a National Book Award nomination. The NBA judges' citation read, in part, "Gaitskill is an unforgiving writer, harsh, caustic, and raw. All that masks the enormous accomplishment of her work, the ability to use the dark to cast light."

Veronica casts its light on an unlikely friendship, recalled by a former model named Alison, now aging and ravaged by hepatitis. In place of the forward march of conventional plotting, we're treated to a kaleidoscope of memories tumbling through Alison's brain as she cleans an ex-lover's office for wages and climbs an overgrown canyon. Past and present events touch each other like naked wires, sending off sparks. We see Alison as a numbly passive teen runaway in San Francisco, plucked from the gutter and groomed for the Paris runway. When that career crashes and burns, she moves to New York and meets the fiercely iconoclastic Veronica, an unglamorous older proofreader whose bisexual lover leaves her with AIDS.

Gaitskill's language has a fervid, hallucinogenic quality; she's like reading crystal meth. "Outside, night was already putting on its neon, and traffic was laying the streets with knotted jewelry." Though Veronica references Robert Mapplethorpe's infamously theatrical self-portraits, its effect is more like an Avedon mug shot: Every pore and blown vein is exposed in a merciless light, but you can't take your eyes from the image. When Gaitskill writes of "nightclubs like cheap boxed hell, full of smoke and giant faces with endlessly talking lips and eyes and snouts swelling and bulbous with beauty," she perfectly captures the glamour and bloat of New York in the club-going eighties.

Mary Gaitskill is known for her candor in interviews, revealing her past as a stripper and sometime sex worker; she once told the Wall Street Journal, "Masochism is normal." In author photos, her face looks severe, even fierce, but the delicate blonde who appears at the door of Terrapin's Red Bistro, scanning the room with uncertain eyes, seems a far softer creature. Only when she stabs a fork into her endive salad and answers, "Why Rhinebeck?" with a gimlet-eyed, acid, "Why not?" is the Gaitskill who wrote Bad Behavior in evidence.

But the answer is as surprising as everything else about Gaitskill: The author, who seems allergic to anything vaguely New Age, met her husband at the Omega Institute. Four years ago, Gaitskill was invited by Rhinebeck resident Ann Patty, who edited Bad Behavior and Two Girls, Fat and Thin, to a spiritual and creative retreat for war veterans. One of the other instructors was writer Peter Trachtenberg (7 Tattoos), and though their romance took months to unfold, Gaitskill left Omega feeling "so beatific" that she misremembered the train ride to New York as 45 minutes and moved from Houston to Rhinebeck on impulse.

The oldest of three sisters, Gaitskill left home at 16. She started writing in earnest two years later, while living in Toronto and working as a stripper. "It still had a feeling of burlesque then, though it was changing. The older strippers in their thirties and forties had feather boas, though they didn't always want to bother with them. But there was a more fully developed idea of a show." One of her favorite colleagues had an act based on Ken Russell's The Devils, with a breakaway nun's habit. Gaitskill's specialty was, not too surprisingly, naughty schoolgirls.

Gaitskill doesn't volunteer much about her childhood, but notes that the effusive dedication to her parents in Two Girls, Fat and Thin was "my crude attempt to let people know this was not about my parents." It wasn't entirely effective. "Some idiot reporter called my dad in Kentucky and asked how he felt about his daughter publishing a novel about father-daughter rape and incest." She imitates her father's bellowed response, "Do you think Edgar Rice Burroughs was raised by apes?" with affection.

The path to literary celebrity wasn't smooth. Gaitskill completed some of the stories in Bad Behavior in her early twenties, but in spite of their obvious polish, couldn't sell any of them to magazines or literary quarterlies, even with the help of an agent. Eventually, the whole collection was snapped up by Poseidon Press. The book's accolades "surpassed my wildest dreams," Gaitskill recalls, adding darkly, "I don't know what would have happened to me if it didn't meet with that kind of response, if it hadn't been published at all. Nothing good."

She is a rigorously careful writer, honing her prose in several-month binges, then laying the manuscript aside until she feels ready to return to it. She sketched out a first draft of Veronica nearly a decade before completing the book. "It was a seed that took a long time to germinate and blossom," Gaitskill explains. "The process was very intuitive." She fed her intuition by reading such stream-of-consciousness classics as Lighthousekeeping, The Hours, Mrs. Dalloway, and Ulysses—books that would "subconsciously support what I was doing"–and immersing herself in research. Knowing next to nothing about the fashion industry, she devoured books by models, conducted interviews with stylists and hairdressers, and went on studio shoots and a "go-see" (a model's audition) to soak up details.

Gaitskill had no idea how Veronica would be received. Though she says, "It's about fall and redemption, that's a universal story," she feared that its densely stylized language would be off-putting, and that fans of her previous work would find it soft or sentimental. When one of her Syracuse University graduate students asked what her new book was about, Gaitskill replied, "Middle-aged women and their problems. You'll hate it."

The critical raves were thrilling, but Gaitskill is characteristically down-to-earth in her response. "I didn't really get to enjoy it that much because I was too tired—I was teaching full-time, and constantly felt pulled in two directions." Asked if she likes to teach, she says, "No," letting the syllable sit by itself for a moment before adding that there are "good moments, and every now and then students I really like. But if I could afford to stop teaching, I would."

Gaitskill's current projects include several stories and another novel, begun in 2000 and written in alternating stints with Veronica. "I hope it won't take me 10 years," she sighs. Is there any subject about which she'd be uncomfortable writing? Gaitskill pauses. "I'd hesitate to write from the point of view of someone from a different race or culture, or someone illiterate—someone whose life experience I'd be afraid I couldn't understand well enough.

"I write about things that interest me or that I observe. I also tend to write about things that trouble me." She cites an unforgettable character in Veronica, an emaciated man who crawls around naked, compulsively licking the floors of an S&M club. Gaitskill saw someone doing just that, years ago, and the image stayed with her. "I thought he was insane, but it was such a metaphor. That man is a picture of obsession with all the juice wrung out of it. Obsession can be very enjoyable. It warms you, makes you feel alive. But you take the juicy feeling away and you're left with a hungry ghost, that desperate, hamster-wheel quality."

Contrast this deeply disturbing image with the poster for the recent film of Gaitskill's story Secretary, in which the title character crawls cutely toward  the viewer, bearing her boss's mail in her mouth like a puppy. Though Gaitskill publicly disdained the film adaptation, which softened her story's sharp edges and lasting sting into a sort of Lifetime Bondage for Women fantasy, she has since declared it "kind of sweet."

She's also developed an interest in acting, and recently played a variety of ensemble roles in the Cocoon Theater's production of A Christmas Carol in Rhinebeck. "I decided I was going nuts, writing so much. You're always inside your head, you can go kind of crazy. It's an inverted world, so cerebral. I wanted to do something physical, something creative, but not just me—where I could be part of a group, and there wasn't so much riding on it. I mean, if you fail at a novel, it's one thing, but if you're not great as First Charity Lady..." Gaitskill lets loose a laugh, her body completely relaxed for the first time since we met. "Cocoon Theatre is like a Dickensian family. The kids all take part. They make all the costumes, sell refreshments at intermission." Her enthusiasm is infectious.

Is it possible that Mary Gaitskill is—as a New Ager might say—getting mellow? Has she followed her character Alison's path through a dark underworld and back into the tenuous sunlight of human connection? Maybe so, but fans of her earlier work will be happy to know she has not lost her edge. Reminded of an exchange in a 1994 interview, when a male journalist asked, "Have you turned any tricks?" and Gaitskill snapped back, "Yes. Have you?" her smile turns wicked. "He would if he could."