Gaitskill has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book Award. She’s the author of the story collections Bad Behavior and Don’t Cry, and the novels Veronica and Two Girls, Fat and Thin. Her stories have appeared in venues like The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, and The Best American Short Stories. She spoke to me by phone.

Mary Gaitskill: I read Anna Karenina for the first time about two years ago. It’s something I’d always meant to read, but for some reason I didn’t expect to like it as much as I did. When I finally settled down to read it, I loved it. What strikes me about the book is how precisely rendered the characters are, how recognizable they are as people. It was written so many years ago, and yet the characters are descriptions of people I know and see.

I found one section in particular so beautiful and intelligent that I actually stood up as I was reading. I had to put the book down, I was so surprised by it—and it took the novel to a whole other level for me.

Anna’s told her husband, Karenin, that that she’s in love with another man and has been sleeping with him. You’re set up to see Karenin as an overly dignified but somewhat pitiable figure: He’s a proud, stiff person. He’s older than Anna is, and he’s balding, and he has this embarrassing mannerism of a squeaky voice. He’s hardened himself against Anna. He’s utterly disgusted with her for having gotten pregnant by her lover, Vronsky. But you have the impression at first that his pride is hurt more than anything else—which makes him unsympathetic.

Then he receives a telegram from Anna that says: Please come, I’m dying, I need you to forgive me.

At first, he thinks it’s a deception. He wants to refuse to go. But then he realizes that it would be too cruel, and that everyone would condemn him—he has to go. So he does.

As he walks into the house where Anna’s dying, in the highest point of her fever, he thinks to himself:

He drew a resolution in the far corner of his brain and consulted it. It read: If it is a deception, then calm contempt and depart. If true, observe propriety.

He comes off as very rigid, even in this moment. We think nothing could shake this man’s stolidity. And when he finds out Anna’s still alive, he suddenly senses how much he was hoping for her to be dead—though this realization shocks him.

Then he hears her babbling, in the height of her fever. And her words are unexpected: She’s saying how kind he is. That, of course, she knows he will forgive her. When Anna finally sees him, she looks at him with a kind of love he’s never seen before, she says:

There’s another woman in me. I’m scared to death of her. It’s her that fell in love with that man. I wanted to hate you and I couldn’t. I’m real now, I’m whole.

Anna’s speaking about the decisions she’s made in the third person—as if the person who betrayed Karenin was a stranger. And she does seem to be transformed here, as though she’s become a different person. I was so surprised by that. I think of it as a very modern insight, Tolstoy’s idea that there may be two, or more, different people inside of us.