In I Love Dick, published in 1997, Chris Kraus, author of Aliens &
Anorexia, Torpor, and Video Green, boldly tore away the veil that
separates fiction from reality and privacy from self-expression. It's no
wonder that I Love Dick instantly elicited violent controversies and
attracted a host of passionate admirers. The story is gripping enough:
in 1994 a married, failed independent filmmaker, turning forty, falls in
love with a well-known theorist and endeavors to seduce him with the
help of her husband. But when the theorist refuses to answer her
letters, the husband and wife continue the correspondence for each other
instead, imagining the fling the wife wishes to have with Dick. What
follows is a breathless pursuit that takes the woman across America and
away from her husband and far beyond her original infatuation into a
discovery of the transformative power of first person narrative. I Love
Dick is a manifesto for a new kind of feminist who isn't afraid to burn
through her own narcissism in order to assume responsibility for herself
and for all the injustice in the world and it's a book you won't put
down until the author's final, heroic acts of self-revelation and
transformation.
