An Evening With Chris Kraus, in conversation with Kaye Mitchell; Waterstone’s, Deansgate, September 27, 2017.

“Hope not 2 offend but if I die please dont let the frenemy w whom I shared a bf read my diaries & write my biog” wrote artist Jesse Darling, in a recent tweet, regarding the launch of Chris Kraus’s new book, “After Kathy Acker: A Biography”.

In the tweet, Jesse Darling places herself in the position of Kathy Acker, the “experimental” novelist who died of cancer in 1997 aged 50, and raises the problem of legacy and the always-questionable relationship between biographer and biographee, particularly for female authors: what is a biography and who gets to write it?

Kraus is very much aware of these questions and problems, or at least appeared to be, in a series of descriptors of the book during a reading and Q&A with Kaye Mitchell in Manchester last night.

The event is short; Kraus, who has a hearing impairment, is a generous reader but has a train to catch. She reads from the opening section of the book, describing a 23 year old Acker, divorced and living in Washington Heights. Acker performs at a live sex show at Time Square’s Fun City alongside her boyfriend. Acker writes, constantly.

When Kraus reads the line from Acker’s diary, “I’m hideous with my short hair and draggy breasts”, Jesse Darling’s words come to mind, for a moment. The book contains chunks of Acker’s writing in italicised sections. Kraus uses the first person only a handful of times, she explains, in order to stay close to Acker. “I wanted it to feel like a seance,” Kraus says, describing Acker’s presence in the book as “like a river, a life essence.”

Reviews of the book have touched on the incestuous nature of the New York scene Acker and Kraus belonged to, or overlapped, and both Kraus and Kaye Mitchell use the word “incestuous” a few times in their discussion – a word that seems to represent the enormous impact of a relatively small group of people, rather than how often they slept with each other.

In that setting, it’s difficult to discuss “After Kathy Acker” without mentioning Kraus’s own biography. When Kraus moved from New Zealand to New York in the late 1970s, beginning her career in film and performance, Acker was already an influential figure and reaching the height of her fame in the scene – “Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula” was published in 1973, “Great Expectations” in 1983. During the subsequent decades they shared the same friends (and a boyfriend). Kraus tells multiple anecdotes from their mutual friends, including one from her ex-husband Sylvère Lotringer: “Kathy once said to Sylvère that all you need to do is to write four pages a day and by the end of the year you’ll have a novel.”

Kraus describes Acker as a prolific writer, with a strong work ethic and dedication to writing – “she was a bad girl, but also a good girl”. The majority of Acker’s novels came from material she wrote daily, she says, and describes her own book projects as the opposite: “I’m more like a good girl in my daily life, but a bad girl when it comes to work.” When asked how her writing process compares to Acker’s, Kraus says she approaches each of her book projects in the same way as making a film – there’s a period of pre-production, in which she gathers her material, and then a period of writing for six days a week once the project begins. In between books, she barely writes at all. “What have I got to write about?” she jokes.

Kraus first began the “pre-production” for the Acker biography shortly after Acker’s death in the early noughties. She interviewed her exes, friends and collaborators, who spoke candidly and at length. “I wasn’t really anybody back then, so nobody really took me seriously,” Kraus says, who eventually dumped the project, concerned that writing the biography so soon after publishing her own “experimental” novel “I Love Dick” in 1999 would just make her look like a “Kathy Acker wannabe.”

Nearly two decades later, it feels like either a kooky parallel or a canny move that “After Kathy Acker” is the first new book from Kraus after the surge in readership of “I Love Dick” over the past few years. The reasons for the revival of “I Love Dick” depends on who you talk to: 1) a new and for some reason unprecedented public appetite for experimental female fiction; 2) the embracing of female writers such as Kraus, Eileen Myles and Rebecca Solnit, now all in their 60s or approaching, a phenomena I’ve heard described as the right recognition, too late, and, in the art world, as a “garden of grandmas”; 3) my personal theory: how epistolary form of “I Love Dick” reflects current modes of communication, via whatsapp and other messaging services, in which we share our inner thoughts in endless, open-ended conversations with a non-physically present yet ultimately real person; 4) the title.

Regarding number 1, Kraus expresses surprise during the Q&A at the praise given to “I Love Dick” for its revolutionary form and “the obsession with what they like to call ‘autofiction’”, as she sees her writing style as heavily influenced by Acker. It was Acker who was a “pioneer” in challenging ideas that a woman writing in 1st person could only be understood as writing memoir, the confessional or introspection – that theory was off limits. “The transgressive thing about Kathy’s work is not the fact that it’s sexual, but the shmooshing of high and low. The idea that the mind is high and the body is low – everything Kathy did was against that.”

After spending so much time with Acker’s writing, Kraus says she respects Acker’s work more than ever – a comment perhaps laced with a touch of Darling. A friend of Kraus’s described “After Acker” as more like a “long essay” than a biography, which is a description Kraus feels happy with. She likes the title, too – also picked by a musician friend: “It sounds like a song title. But also it leaves it open to this idea of what came after her.”

No longer a “wannabe” but an influential writer documenting the life of another – although a documentation which has been questioned in some reviews – Kraus ends the evening by discussing Acker’s political intuition and relevance today. She gives a final image of Acker riding a motorcycle across the United States, befriending truckers and others, as a woman acutely aware of the harsh schisms in the American mediascape – and “what they now call alternative facts”.

NJ Stallard

Comments are closed.