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    A Study Guide for Mary Gaitskill's "Tiny, Smiling Daddy"
    A Study Guide for Mary Gaitskill's "Tiny, Smiling Daddy"
    A Study Guide for Mary Gaitskill's "Tiny, Smiling Daddy"
    Ebook40 pages23 minutes

    A Study Guide for Mary Gaitskill's "Tiny, Smiling Daddy"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Mary Gaitskill's "Tiny, Smiling Daddy," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJul 27, 2016
    ISBN9781535841122
    A Study Guide for Mary Gaitskill's "Tiny, Smiling Daddy"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Mary Gaitskill's "Tiny, Smiling Daddy" - Gale

      13

      Tiny, Smiling Daddy

      Mary Gaitskill

      1997

      Introduction

      The story that Mary Gaitskill tells in Tiny, Smiling Daddy is woven from familiar elements that most modern readers have faced at one time or another. It concerns a father, Stew, who is mired in his old-fashioned views of the world and finds it difficult to come to grips with the fact that his daughter is gay, and a daughter, Kitty, who copes with her father's rejection by publishing her thoughts where the whole world can see them. She publishes her thoughts in a magazine, but the urge toward self-revelation that the story addresses relates to the ways people today discuss their lives on Twitter, Facebook, and other forms of social media.

      Finding out about the article drives Stew down a path of contemplation that is not normal for him, because he is not a very reflective person. He thinks about his daughter's life with him, how he found out about her orientation, and how he responded to it, and readers are left waiting to see whether he will ever reach a point of regret for driving her away.

      Tiny, Smiling Daddy was published in Gaitskill's 1997 second short-story collection, Because They Wanted To. Since its publication, the author has come to be recognized as one of America's preeminent working fiction writers, nominated for major awards and regularly included in anthologies and best story collections.

      Author Biography

      Gaitskill was born on November 11, 1954, in Lexington, Kentucky. Her father was a college teacher, her mother a homemaker. Her childhood was spent in a suburb of Detroit. It was not a happy childhood: she ran away from home for a while, living on her own in New York City at the age of sixteen, supporting herself as an exotic dancer. At the age of eighteen she decided to become a writer and went back to school. She attended the University of Michigan, where she won the coveted Hopwood Award for her writing and earned a bachelor of arts degree in 1981.

      In 1988 her first book was published, the short-story collection Bad Behavior, which earned her national attention. With this book, critics formed an expectation for Gaitskill's writings that would continue through the coming years, seeing her as a writer of tension and sexual insecurity. One

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