"It's hard to protect a person you love from pain, because people often choose pain. I am a person who often chooses pain. An animal will never choose pain." Mary Gaitskill, whose new novel, The Mare (Pantheon Books, 2015), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, reads from her personal essay "Lost Cat" (Granta, 2009) at Baruch College.