Gaitskill's favorite writers have changed over time, as she noted in a 2005 interview, but one constant is the author Vladimir Nabokov, whose "Lolita" "will be on my ten favorites list until the end of my life." Another consistently named influence is Flannery O'Connor. Despite her well-known S/M themes, Gaitskill does not appear to consider the Marquis de Sade himself an influence, or at least not a literary one: "I don't think much of Sade as a writer, although I enjoyed beating off to him as a child."