After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography

Name: After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography
Author: Chris Kraus
ISBN: 9781635900064

by Chris Kraus

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.…

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"How do you recount the life of someone who obsessively cultivated a self-mythology? Kathy Acker was an author of the punk literary scene who seemingly rubbed shoulders and bumped uglies with everyone before she died in 1997. I tore through this biography as if it were a mystery novel. Chris Kraus pieces together Acker’s story through the evidence left behind: her books, her letters, her financial records and the memories of her contemporaries. It’s hard to tell whether Kraus uncovers the events of Acker’s life or the fable she left behind – it’s a slippery matter, and perhaps, in the end, they’re one and the same."

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