About the Book
GUARDIAN, EVENING STANDARD AND BOOKFORUM BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2017
Kathy Acker: Rich girl, street punk, scholar, stripper, victim, media-whore ... and cultural icon.
The late Kathy Acker's legend and writings are wrapped in mythologies, many of them created by her. Twenty years after her untimely death aged just 50, Acker's legend has faded, but her writing has become clearer.
A few years ago, the writer Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick, found that her own experiences were becoming more and more like Kathy's. She began writing about Acker 'through the distance, but with this incredible frisson of feeling that often I could write "I" instead of "she."'
This is 'literary friction': The first fully authorised biography of the avant-garde writer Kathy Acker, by the woman who arrived on the scene straight after her, who shared some of her boyfriends and friends, and her artistic ambitions
Using exhaustive archival research and ongoing conversations with mutual colleagues and friends, Kraus traces the woman behind the notorious novels, and places her at the centre of a kaleidoscopic artistic world.
'The path of the female artist. Is hell.
Chris Kraus's veracious and intricately structured portrait rouses and stirs as it documents in meticulous and fascinating detail the life, work and body of Kathy Acker and what it takes to a become a 'great writer as countercultural hero.' Viv Albertine
'This is a gossipy, anti-mythic artist biography which feels like it's being told in one long rush of a monologue over late-night drinks by someone who was there.' Sheila Heti
About the Author :
Chris Kraus is the author of I Love Dick; Aliens and Anorexia; Torpor; Summer of Hate and two books of cultural criticism. She was a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow and teaches writing at European Graduate School.
Review :
This is a gossipy, anti-mythic artist biography which feels like it's being told in one long rush of a monologue over late-night drinks by someone who was there. As such, we learn as much much about Kathy Acker as we do about the mores of the artists and writers who surrounded her in the last three decades of the twentieth century. Acker emerges as an unlikely literary hero, but an utterly convincing one.
The path of the female artist. Is hell.
Chris Kraus's veracious and intricately structured portrait rouses and stirs as it documents in meticulous and fascinating detail the life, work and body of Kathy Acker and what it takes to a become a 'great writer as countercultural hero.'
'To lie is to try,' Chris Kraus writes in this examination of the various personae of Kathy Acker, the fucked-up girl from high school who, through lying and trying, became an experimental writer of rare courage and vision. In some ways a contemporary and in some ways as far off as the days when people moved to New York and San Francisco for the cheap rent, Acker needed a key, and Chris Kraus provides it.
Chris Kraus's After Acker sets the bar for what will surely be a new era of critical and biographical reckoning with the life and work of Kathy Acker. Kraus had a ringside seat, has done her homework, and here provides a substantive effort to pay homage not only to the complex, singular, raucous, and crucial writer and human that Acker was, but also to the constellation of artists, musicians, writers, and thinkers who were her friends, lovers, inspirations, and fellow makers of history.
Hardly anyone writes better or more insightfully than Chris Kraus about the lives of women and artists. After Kathy Acker is an intense, riveting portrait of a writer who was raw and savvy, fragile and brilliant, whose self-deceptions were inseparable from her greatness. Quotes from her profane and passionate journals reveal Kathy the crazy poet, the bad girlfriend, the Upper East Side schoolgirl, the downtown writer, Kathy in love and in denial. Gossipy, sexy, tragic, terrific.
Kraus's latest book, After Kathy Acker, about the late experimental writer, is a departure in genre-it's Kraus's first biography-but it's still committed to her driving questions about art and community and risk, especially this one: How do you make fearless art from the messy stuff of consciousness?
Kraus, author of the cult 1997 novel I Love Dick, is the perfect mediator for Acker, finding in her work an aesthetics of provocation, discomfiture, risk and radical empathy.
Now that we have Chris's completely enthralling book, a new generation of writers will be inspired by Kathy. It's a gift to Kathy Acker and her legacy, and a gift to all the women who read Chris's books and shared her books and posted passages of her books on Tumblr and who made it possible for I Love Dick to exist as an Amazon series starring Kevin Bacon. Now that Chris has our attention, she's drawing us toward her muses. There's something quite beautiful about that.
It's impossible to overstate the monumentality of these minds side-by-side... Kraus combines biography and philosophy, exhibiting intimate familiarity with not only French critical theory - one of Acker's primary inspirations- but also the punk poet's vast "constellation of influences." Reading tarot, interpreting astrological signs, Kraus mimics the disjunction of Acker's identities by intercutting diary entries and excerpts from her correspondence, embracing fragmentation as a method for inquiry
Kraus is a generous, admiring, but not uncritical narrator in this comprehensive biography of author Kathy Acker "a post-punk icon for the Bush/Thatcher years."
Kraus reconstitutes Acker's wanderings with real wit and beauty, understanding without pandering to the painfully high stakes of her identity games
To pin down the real Kathy Acker then is a self-defeating task but Chris Kraus's biography of her is a brilliant and necessary thing. There is a wonderful ambivalence between subject and object here, which wires up a tension throughout this incredibly well-researched book... Kraus pushes Acker's writing to the foreground making us understand how difficult a territory the so-called avant-garde was, and is, for a woman.
Kraus goes beneath the image that has ossified around Acker since her death (tattooed, buzz cut, "sex-positive") and reaffirms her identity as a hard-working writer with a deep-rooted knowledge of her craft, steeped in classical literature as much as Burroughs and the Beats. She boldly places Acker as the first woman to shoot for the counter-cultural hero, the swashbuckling literary seeker.
In this first authorized biography of Acker, Kraus refracts these myths through the prism of a deep archive of letters, diaries, published work, and interviews with those who knew her to offer a loving portrait of an artist that is also a tremendous pleasure to read.(...) Like Acker, Chris Kraus has made big art from a big life.
Ultimately, Kraus entwines accounts of a writer into an impressive tapestry, with Acker emerging from the chaos of a difficult life. Almost 20 years after her death, she stands out for her total lack of compromise and dedication to her craft, and the result is a figure whose shock tactics refuse to date.
Kraus is both present and absent in this book, creating an intriguing tension. For the most part, she relies on Acker's remarkable letters, allowing her to speak for herself. Presented with a passage of text, or an early art project, Kraus is an erudite, often unconventional critic.
I loved After Kathy Acker, an appropriately eccentric biography of the post-punk author that restores her to her rightful place in the literary history of the past 40 years
It used to be Plath, but now some part of every girl writer will want to be like Kathy Acker, especially those who are interested in pain; whether pain as kink or pain as artistic production. Her life was a hot mess, and these pages capture the heat of it. After Kathy Acker by Chris Kraus (Allen Lane) is hectic, less than objective, very much alive.
