It's the birthday of the novelist and short-story writer Mary Gaitskill, (books by this author) born in Lexington Kentucky (1954). She had a difficult childhood. Her parents moved around a lot, and she never felt like she fit in anywhere. When she was 15, she was kicked out of boarding school. A psychiatrist recommended that her parents have her committed to a mental hospital. She ran away from home, but her parents tracked her down and had her hospitalized anyway. She was released after two months, and at the age of 16 she took off to San Francisco to live on her own.

She supported herself as a stripper and occasional prostitute until she had saved enough money to go to college, where she studied journalism. And she began writing short stories. When her first collection Bad Behavior came out in 1988, it got a lot of attention for examining the lives of prostitutes and drug addicts and sadomasochists. She said, "My experience of life as essentially unhappy and uncontrollable taught me to examine the way people, including myself, create survival systems ... for themselves in unorthodox and sometimes apparently self-defeating ways. These inner worlds, although often unworkable and unattractive in social terms, can have a unique beauty and courage."

Her novel Veronica came out in 2005, and many critics have called it a masterpiece.

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