Kathy Acker (April 18, 1947[2] [disputed] – November 30, 1997) 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.
[8] Acker's grandparents went into political exile from Alsace-Lorraine prior to World War I, due to the rising nationalism of pre-Nazi Germany, moving to Paris and then to the United States.
")[9] Acker was raised in her mother and stepfather's home in the Sutton Place neighborhood of Manhattan's prosperous Upper East Side.
In February 1978, she married the composer and experimental musician Peter Gordon due to a cancer scare, and the pair ended their seven-year relationship shortly afterward.
[19][20] In 1996, Acker left San Francisco and moved to London to live with the writer and music critic Charles Shaar Murray.
"[24] In the article, she explains that after unsuccessful surgery, which left her feeling physically mutilated and emotionally debilitated, she rejected the passivity of the patient in the medical mainstream and began to seek out the advice of nutritionists, acupuncturists, psychic healers, and Chinese herbalists.
[4] She died in what was called "Room 101", to which her friend Alan Moore quipped, "There's nothing that woman can't turn into a literary reference."
(Room 101, in the climax of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, turns out to be the torture chamber in which the Inner Party subjects its political prisoners to their own worst fears.
[27] Her controversial body of work borrows heavily from the experimental styles of William S. Burroughs and Marguerite Duras, with critics often comparing her writing to that of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jean Genet.
These writers include Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Keats, William Faulkner, T. S. Eliot, the Brontë sisters, the Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille, and Arthur Rimbaud.
[18] That same year, she was signed by Grove Press, one of the legendary independent publishers committed to controversial and avant-garde writing; she was one of the last writers taken on by Barney Rosset before the end of his tenure there.
[3] Notwithstanding the increased recognition she garnered for Great Expectations, Blood and Guts in High School is often considered Acker's breakthrough work.
Borrowing from, among other texts, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Blood and Guts details the experiences of Janey Smith, a sex-addicted and pelvic inflammatory disease-ridden urbanite who is in love with a father who sells her into slavery.
In its original publications by Picador and Grove Press, the final two chapters were accidentally reversed from Acker's intended order; the mistake was corrected in the 2017 re-publication of the novel.
In 1988, she published Literal Madness: Three Novels, which included three previously-published works: Florida deconstructs and reduces John Huston's 1948 film noir Key Largo into its base sexual politics, Kathy Goes to Haiti details a young woman's relationship and sexual exploits while on vacation, and My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini provides a fictional autobiography of the Italian filmmaker in which he solves his own murder.
[33] Between 1990 and 1993, she published four more books: In Memoriam to Identity (1990); Hannibal Lecter, My Father (1991); Portrait of an Eye: Three Novels (1992), also composed of already-published works; and My Mother: Demonology (1992).
Her collection, Portrait of an Eye, was championed by publisher Fred Jordan, who had discovered her work at Grove Press before moving to Pantheon and sent an early copy of the book to William Burroughs in 1991.
[34] Her last novel, Pussy, King of the Pirates, was published in 1996,[35] which she, Rico Bell, and the rest of rock band the Mekons also reworked into an operetta, which they performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in 1997.
[37] Grove Press published two unpublished early novellas in the volume Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective and The Burning Bombing of America, and a collection of selected work, Essential Acker, edited by Amy Scholder and Dennis Cooper in 2002.
In 2002, New York University staged Discipline and Anarchy, a retrospective exhibition of her works,[40] while in 2008, London's Institute of Contemporary Arts screened an evening of films influenced by Acker.
[41] A collection of essays on Acker's work, titled Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker, edited by Carla Harryman, Avital Ronell, and Amy Scholder, was published by Verso Books in 2006 and includes essays by Nayland Blake, Leslie Dick, Robert Glück, Carla Harryman, Laurence Rickels, Avital Ronell, Barrett Watten, and Peter Wollen.
A limited body of her recorded readings and discussions of her works exists in the special collections archive of University of California, San Diego.
[46] In 2018, British writer Olivia Laing published Crudo, a novel which references Acker's works and life, and whose main character is a woman called Kathy, suffering double breast cancer; yet book's events are situated in August–September 2017.
[48] Kate Zambreno wrote on Kathy Acker in her essay "New York City, Summer 2013" published as part of the collection Screen Tests (Harpers Collins, 2019).
Justin Gajoux and Claire Finch, critical edition of unpublished early writings from 1971 to 1975 Discussion/reading of two poems from the novel Blood and Guts in High School This is not a complete list.