Click here to read the entire interview on The Believer website.
And please note that after conducting the interview with Mary Gaitskill, in the midst of our correspondence, she sent me the following paragraph, which she agreed to have reproduced here:
It's too late to change this in the printed piece, but do you recall when you asked me if I would respect a man who would act as a wife and do a lot of the support work so I could focus on writing? I said “no” but in retrospect, that was really a reflexive answer. I’m not at all sure that’s true, it would depend very much on why he was doing it. Conventionally, and we are all influenced by convention, we think of a man who does that as weak and submissive. But that isn’t necessarily always true. I don’t get any impression that Vera Nabokov behaved the way she did because she was either of those things -- quite the contrary. I think she took the supportive role becasue she recognized that her husband had a great talent and that it made more sense, was in fact the more dignified choice to get behind that than to focus on something of her own which did not have the potential for greatness. If a man was truly acting out of that impulse, it would be foolish to disrespect him. He could still have his own life, just as Vera had a son to raise and Leonard Woolf had an imprint to run. But their support of their talented spouses was noble, and would be no less so in a straight man, if he was coming from a sincere place, not a submissive one.