After Kathy Acker:

A Literary Biography (Semiotext(e) / Active Agents)

by Chris Kraus

Semiotext(e)

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I LOVE KATHY ACKER.

I love that Kathy Acker’s family money came from gloves and a New York butchery.

I love that in a 1991 interview for the “Angry Women” Issue Of The Journal RE/Search, Acker seems to speak entirely in exclamation marks.

I love that when the young, pre–Bikini Kill Kathleen Hanna tracked down her idol at a workshop in Seattle, Acker rebuffed her, saying that her brand of feminism was naive (Sexism destroys men, too, Acker told her) and that she should quit writing and start a band.

She was the hinge for so many of America’s best late-twentieth-century mythologies—Riot Grrrl, cyberpunk, biker gangs—where righteous anger is matched by the modes and means to spectacularize it.

I love that in Kathy Acker’s final years she found such joy performing a version of her 1996 book, Pussy, King of the Pirates, with the Mekons; that in those same years, as she flirted with nascent Bay Area internet communes, she aspired to abandon novels for video games. I love that she attended a Mondo 2000–sponsored premiere of the 1992 movie Sneakers. And that she spent $7,500 on clothes the year before she scoffed at the price of chemotherapy ($20,000), her refusal of which almost certainly accelerated her death from cancer, in a Tijuana alternative-medicine clinic, in 1997, after months of consultations with psychic healers and nutritionists who assured her she was cured. I love that she bought a new motorcycle every time she moved cities and that she acquired apartments in Islington, Brighton, and Greenwich Village, some of which she would never set foot in, or would sleep in

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