The first authorized biography of postmodernism's literary hero, Kathy
Acker.
Acker's life was a fable; and to describe the confusion and love and
conflicting agendas behind these memorials would be to sketch an
apocryphal allegory of an artistic life in the late twentieth century.
It is girls from which stories begin, she wrote in her last notebook.
And like other lives, but unlike most fables, it was created through
means both within and beyond her control.
--from After Kathy Acker
Rich girl, street punk, lost girl and icon... scholar, stripper, victim,
and media-whore: The late Kathy Acker's legend and writings are wrapped
in mythologies, created mostly by Acker herself. Twenty years after her
death, Acker's legend has faded, making her writing more legible.
In this first, fully authorized, biography, Chris Kraus approaches Acker
both as a writer and as a member of the artistic communities from which
she emerged. At once forensic and intimate, After Kathy Acker traces
the extreme discipline and literary strategies Acker used to develop her
work, and the contradictions she longed to embody. Using exhaustive
archival research and ongoing conversations with mutual colleagues and
friends, Kraus charts Acker's movement through some of the late
twentieth century's most significant artistic enterprises.
Beginning in her mid-teens, Acker lived her ideal of the Great Writer as
Cultural Hero, and as Kraus argues, she may well have been the only
female writer to succeed in assuming this role. She died of untreated
cancer at an alternative clinic in Tijuana when she was fifty years old,
but the real pathos of Acker's life may have been in the fact that by
then she'd already outlived her ideal.
