After Kathy Acker

Kathy Acker built a legend around herself, and the labels attached to it run from rich girl and street punk to scholar, stripper and media-whore. Twenty years after her death, Chris Kraus sets out to look past those mythologies, most of which Acker created herself. This is the first fully authorized biography of the writer.

Kraus treats Acker as a writer and as a member of the artistic communities she came from. The book follows the discipline and the literary strategies Acker used to build her work, along with the contradictions she wanted to embody. The tone is both forensic and intimate.

Kraus draws on extensive archival research and continuing conversations with friends and colleagues they shared. Through them she charts Acker's path across some of the most significant artistic enterprises of the late twentieth century. The fading of the legend, she suggests, makes the writing easier to read now.

Acker began living as the Great Writer, a Cultural Hero, while still in her mid-teens. Kraus argues that she may have been the only woman writer to manage that role. She died at fifty of untreated cancer at an alternative clinic in Tijuana, and the book asks whether the deeper sadness lay in having already outlived that ideal.