Kathy acker biography

Completely enthralling&#;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&#; books. ~Lenny Letter

This critical biography is a wonderful read for long-time fans of both Acker and Kraus, and it will likely be an engaging one even for those unfamiliar with their work, but who are interested in the development and vicissitudes of an accomplished artist&#;s life. ~Chicago Review of Books

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. ~Julie Phillips, author of The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon

'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. ~Benjamin Moser, author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector

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, author of Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys: A Memoir

Chris Kraus&#;s After Kathy Acker sets th

Kathy Acker is the perfect subject for a literary biography. Her work is unreadable; her allure is undeniable. She died a tragic death, from breast cancer, at age She was a bodybuilder, she was a feminist — then again, maybe not. “I’m so queer I’m not even gay,” she said. She struck a fierce pose: tattooed, mounting a motorcycle. She once forced Neil Gaiman to “whip her p—.” Even in death, she is deeply intimidating.

My mom, looking through my books during a recent visit, picked up my copy of the latest book on Acker, Jason McBride’s biography “Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker,” and said, “What is this about?!” What, indeed, mom.

Acker has become a small-scale personality cult. She represents a kind of deconstructivist punk empress. Her work, with its collage of classic texts and her own biography, has influenced countless writers. Her name, dropped, is a calling card. Kathy Acker is hardcore.

Growing up in New York in an “affluent” neighborhood with a mother who concealed their Jewishness and the fact that her husband had walked out the moment he learned she was pregnant, Acker performed toughness from a young age. She was “from the streets,” even if those streets might have been the Upper East Side, where Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller were neighbors. Especially after the death of her stepfather, the family’s affluence was far more precarious than it seemed. On Christmas Eve , with less than $30 in her bank account, Acker’s mother checked into the Midtown Hilton and took her own life.

When Bo

This weekend is the Kathy Acker in Seattle symposium, exploring her visits to Seattle in and , and the influence she had on younger writers, artists, and musicians. I was unable to attend, but I participated in the symposium via Skype. I read an essay/chapter that I wrote about Acker a long time ago, a text that I am still proud of &#; it is probably the greatest success I have ever had in not commenting on another writer, but mingling their prose with my own (thus mimicking Acker&#;s own technique as a writer). I am not sure how well it all went: there were sound issues with the Skype transmission, and I read much faster than I ought to have done, in order not to overrun my time slot.
But in any case, I prefaced the reading with a short remembrance of Kathy Acker, how I met her, and how I saw her both as a writer and as a person. I am reproducing this here:

I want to talk about Kathy Acker as a person, somebody I knew; but also about Kathy Acker as a writer. The two are not identical, though it is difficult to disentwine them. Indeed, Acker&#;s construction of her public persona as an avant-garde punk-feminist icon is certainly one part of her accomplishment as an artist.

But I still wish to put the emphasis where I think it belongs, which is in Kathy Acker&#;s accomplishments as a writer. There is something overwhelming about her fiction, which has to do with the way that it combines emotional intensity with rigorous and incisive intellectual abstraction. These qualities are generally considered to be entirely incompatible with one another. You can be raw and immediate, or you can be distant and reflective; but you aren&#;t supposed to be able to be both at once. And yet this is what Acker accomplishes in her writing. She conveys the urgency and excitement of sexual arousal, and the pain and rage that come from a lover&#;s betraying you. But she also takes us away from all these feelings — estranges us, as the old modernist critics would put it — in order

American novelist and playwright (–)

Kathy Acker (April 18, [disputed] – November 30, ) was an American experimental novelist, playwright, essayist, and postmodernist writer, known for her idiosyncratic and transgressive writing that dealt with themes such as childhood trauma, sexuality and rebellion. Her writing incorporates pastiche and the cut-up technique, involving cutting-up and scrambling passages and sentences; she also defined her writing as existing in the post-nouveau roman European tradition. In her texts, she combines biographical elements, power, sex and violence.

Biography

Early life

The only child of Donald and Claire (nee Weill) Lehman, Acker was born Karen Lehman in New York City in , although the Library of Congress gives her birth year as , while the editors of Encyclopædia Britannica gave her birth year as April 18, , New York, New York, U.S. She died on November 30, , in Tijuana, Mexico. Most obituaries, including The New York Times, cited her birth year as

Her family was from a wealthy, assimilated German-Jewish background that was culturally but not religiously Jewish. Her maternal grandmother, Florence Weill, was an Austrian Jew who had inherited a small fortune from her husband's glove-making business. Acker's grandparents went into political exile from Alsace-Lorraine prior to World War I, due to the rising nationalism of pre-Nazi Germany,