Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant!!!
Review: BECAUSE THEY WANTED TO is an absolute masterpiece of literature! Gaitskill's ability to describe the most complex and dark human emotions is stunning; each story is well-written down to the smallest detail, and you are able to relate to the pain of the characters--even if you have never experienced the things that they are going through yourself.
"The Wrong Thing," a four-part story of one woman's inability to find a meaningful romantic relationship, was my favorite one in the book. The main character, Susan, is presented in a way that allows readers to feel her pain and to sympathize with her as she goes through various struggles. This story was the last one in the collection, and its ending was also a great ending for the entire book.
The other stories are also good: from a woman who is obsessed with her dentist, to a 16-year-old runaway who is just trying to find ways to support herself, to a woman who realizes that she just might love a much younger man...these stories all touch the soul. This collection is in some ways lighter than Gaitskill's gritty BAD BEHAVIOR, but it is still full of complexity and people who display extreme examples of human emotion.
Highly recommended!!!
Rating:
Summary: If you can't look away
Review: Gaitskill is not for the timid or comfortable. Read her if, for you, the erotic is inextricably intertwined with the dark side of human nature.
Rating:
Summary: Superb, insightful, an intellectual feast
Review: Gaitskill takes the reader from the most perverse sexual fantasies to the pressures and problems associated with family life. This collection of short stories drags the reader, however, through a muck of sex, drugs, and profanity leaving the reader with an unsanitary feeling. She surfaces ideas and mental images into ones mind that ought to stay buried. I felt that nothing was benefitted from reading this book. A majority of the book I spent cringing my nose at the grotesque images and ideas that Gaitskill presents. This book was definetely a wild ride that I would not venture to take again.
Rating: 
Summary: Because it has a pretty cover.
Review: Having read Bad Behavior, I couldn't wait to get my hands on Mary Gaitskill's newest collection of short stories. Because They Wanted To is everything I'd expected. The stories are beautiful and lyrical in a profound way. My favorite ones are "Orchid," "Because They Wanted To," "Comfort," and "Turgor." However, "The Girl on the Plane" is the one that spoke to me the most. The story of how a married man stumbles upon the woman he'd raped years ago was food for thought. I was duly impressed with Gaitskill's disarmingly perceptive takes on male and female relationships in Bad Behavior, and she has outdone herself with this effort. The characterization and story development are second to none in this book. Are you in the bargain for thought-provoking stories? I suggest you pick up this wonderful piece of modern literature.
Rating:
Summary: Because it has a pretty cover.
Review: I basically agree with everyone's criticism. Gaitskill harps on a point till you want to say, "Shut up already! No one CARES." Which I'm sure is counterproductive to her artistic crusade. I typically don't mind authors breaking from the beginning-middle-end formula if they do it well, or at least intend to do it well. If they fail miserably, then they deserve to be panned. Gaitskill fails miserably. It's like she didn't even care for her stories by the time she got to the end of them. She could have written one novella with all these crappy stories and still come out behind, but should could have saved a little face that way.
Rating:
Summary: Star Light, Star Bright, The Only Star I Give Tonight...
Review: I give only one star because of Gaitskill's inate obssession with sex, homosexuality, psychos, dead-beats, and therapists. If you read one story you've read them all.
Let's take sex and homosexuality. From a girl giving oral sex to a guy for $20 to a man who joins a gang bang on a girl at a bar, almost every story revovles around sex. 'The Girl On The Plane' has a man talking to a complete stranger about a poor girl who he gang banged. Along with the sex, all the women are lesbian/bi-sexuals. A mention, once or twice would be fine, but too much takes away from any meaning. In the last few stories about the middle aged, bi-sexual, friendless, Susan who has sexual relationship with a woman, there is no real point about going on and on about her trek that doesn't have a strong meaning. Every page is flooded with her pointless endeavours to have a normal relationship with her partner. There more to write about than just sex/homosexuality.
Rating:
Summary: A Cerebral Salad of Souls (sorry!)
Review: I loved this book! It?s a collection of short stories about men and women of all ages (mostly in their 30s though). Gaitskill has a beautiful style of writing. Her descriptions are wonderfully unique and filled with imagery. All of the relationships she portrays are fascinating because all of her characters are damaged in one way or another. Some of my favorite stories (almost all of them, really) were Tiny Smiling Daddy, about the father who recalls and regrets his reaction to learning of his daughter's "coming out." Because They Wanted To, was about Elise, a 16 year-old runaway who takes care of a stranger's kids. Orchid, about old friends seeing each other after so many years, thus stirring up memories of a close friendship bordering on love. The Blanket, about a relationship between an older woman and a younger man. Finally there's one of my favorites, Girl on a Plane, where a man looks back on his misdeeds after meeting a woman who mysteriously reminds him of a girl he once knew. Then there's The Dentist, where a girl named Jill endlessly chases this man whom the author gives no name (which clues you into his personality!). In the last four stories, the narration changes to the first person and takes on a much more lively pace. However, that does not take away the depth of the all of the preceding stories. Gaitskill is flawless at exposing the complexities of the human psyche. Furthermore, she exposes the maddening efforts people make to connect with one another. Illustrating every character as a unique individual, Gaitskill gives each person his or her own set of baggage, idiosyncrasies, and methods of survival. Instead of simple love stories where boy meets girl--boy and girl fall in love--they live happily ever after, here's a a collection of relationships, each with their own harrowing progressions, ups and downs, and a million different paths of resolution, not all necessarily "happy." As an amateur writer, I'm inspired by her work and each story teaches me something new.
Rating:
Summary: Incredible collection, but not for everyone
Review: I've been a short story fan since I was a teen, had a love-hate relationship with the New Yorker ever since. Too many short stories follow that formula--middle class protaganists, emphasis on interior life rather than plot, conflict deriving from relationships, with the epiphany arriving right on schedule in the last 2 pages. Updike and Munro do this really well. Even though Mary Gaitskill's collection follows some of these rules, I found it breathtakingly original and powerful. She pushes the interiority of her characters to an extreme, and I'd have to say the single trait of these stories I admire most is their ability to make you feel what her characters do. Forget plot, for the most part--the value here is in the subtle observations of love and sexuality. These stories have an edge unknown to your average buttoned-down New Yorker writer--only Thom Jones at his best can surpass her there. With Gaitskill, Jones and Junot Diaz, we're finally starting to get some short story writers who don't seem to have spent their lives hiding in the suburbs. Don't read this book in a hurry--savor it.
Rating:
Summary: Worth Every Penny -- The Very Best By Gaitskill
Review: Just the other day at the dentist I was reading Reader's Digest and I saw a quote by Laura Bush. In it, she compared a really good book that you can't put down to an itch that you just can't stop scratching. It made me smile because I immediately knew that this was the best way to describe Mary Gaitskill's Because They Wanted To: Stories. As someone who has a lengthy commute, having something entertaining to read to-and-from work is important and it's why this book is ideal since it is a collection of easy to pour through short stories. I've reread this book several times; each time I pick up another compelling, vivid detail that just solidifies its place in my "top ten" list of all-time favorite reads. Gaitskill is brutely honest, and sometimes even shocking. But she's never, ever not worth reading. If you enjoyed Bad Behavior, you'll find this book to be an even better release by Gaitskill.
Rating:
Summary: The Real Thing
Review: Mary Gaitskill is the real thing, as Hem said about F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Coke says about itself. She is one of those writers you feel writes in black blood, and only tells lies to clarify the truth. Like Bukowski, she is attracted to the ugly truth far more than representation of the beautiful or the good. Her detailed descriptions of female pixies and the inexorable pivots on which their love lives slip into what would be despair if they were not so inured to pain from its constant presence, her often seamless use of flashbacks in narrators or protagonists chaotically attracted to their abusive pasts, and her beautiful, precise use of language separate her from the pack. Her ability to pierce (and possess) with her putatively lesbian mind the consciousness of young males on the make, or a father disappointed in his daughter, her unabashed confrontations with the brutality of the real--her stubborn prying open of a literary window between the twin horrors of youthful innocence stripped away by male desire and firm female flesh by cellulite in the bad joke of time--her failure to comfort herself with pabulum, her skewering of the dishonest and the false with a quill tipped in poison love are what make her great.
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