This took me forever to finish because it made me realize that while I didn't know of Acker before picking this up, I really don't like her as a person (and can't speak to her writing). It's hard to call her a feminist when she sees almost every woman as a potential threat to the man she's with, and complains about being poor when she actually has a bunch of money. This shows that she had a complex life that resulted in her being the way she was, but I don't think it does enough to challenge the shitty way she treated other people, instead of it being just one component of her career.

Kathy Acker was an enigmatic person even to those who thought they knew her well -- the author, Jason McBride does a marvelous job trying to put together a puzzle without all of the pieces - he calls it a biography with holes. But even with that, I feel I got incredible insights and glimpses into Kathy the person and Kathy the artist. He was able to access information from her journals as well as interviews with former lovers, friends and artists. Not everyone has something nice to say which makes this less of a hagiography and more of a balanced and complex view into her life. I had some familiarity with Kathy's work before reading this and after reading this, it got me curious about diving deeper into some of her writings. Given this is the author's first book, I am really impressed at how well he pulled this complex portrait of an artist together. I recommend this book.

Thank you to Netgalley and Simon & Schuster for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

This biography reads, in some ways, like a novel, which feels very appropriate for Kathy Acker. Author Jason McBride tells Acker's life through a strong storytelling lens, seamlessly weaving in contradictory takes on facts (or "facts") and/or anecdotes. McBride also threads through Acker's writing, which is another way she, as the subject, comes to life. Although McBride shows or illustrates the different ways people in Acker's life remember things (or, perhaps, different versions of facts), he does not condescend toward Acker or make this about taking her apart. This feels more like attempt to see her in a bigger way with as much dimension as is feasible on the written page. I look forward to using this in some of my classes for adults so that we can discuss how writers can--and do--create themselves.

Thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for the advanced reader copy.

This week’s headline? Blood and guts

Why this book? I love Kathy Acker

Which book format? ARC

Primary reading environment? Chilled out on the couch

Any preconceived notions? I’m learning some new things about Acker

Identify most with? n/a

Three little words? “elaborate dream maps” “scoured, stunned, ravage”

Goes well with? Blood and Guts in High School and Empire of the Senseless

Recommend this to? Writers without borders

Other cultural accompaniments: https://youtu.be/2w0eikbVNpw

Grade: 4/5

I leave you with this: “She became a writer in spite of writing.”

“I couldn’t keep track of her because she was moving so much.”

📚📚📚

I was introduced to Kathy Acker back in 2010 and wasn’t sure what I was reading at first. Acker’s writing is fierce, erotic, raw. Punk. Experimental. This biography encapsulates her life and writing, how intelligent and complicated she was. She was a force to be reckoned with and I wish I could’ve met her. This bio is for people like me, those who love her books or are at least familiar with her work and have an interest in the artists that have surrounded her.

Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker will be available November 29, 2022.

I read a lot - a lot. I picked up this book because of the author, the brilliant James McBride, knowing absolutely nothing about Kathy Acker. I hadn’t heard of her, despite my 54 years. What a revelation this book is - how fun for me that I get to now read Acker’s works after reading this incredible biography. McBride is such a good writer - I was captivated from beginning to end. Thanks to Simon and Schuster for the advanced copy. What a gift.

It is difficult to write a biography -- to assmeble the traces that somebody has left behind them, and use those traces to reconstruct, in words, the person in question. It is very difficult to get to know another person, even if they are still alive and you are close to them. It is even more difficult, once the person is dead. But it is equally difficult, albeit for different reasons, to know oneself. The immediate acquaintance I have with myself, in the first person, is always filled with distortions and blind spots. The attempt to know myself is inevitably bound to fail -- although the effort might in fact lead me to transform myself, which is perhaps a more important thing than to know myself.

These dilemmas are central to Kathy Acker's writing; and they are also central to Jason McBride's new biography of Acker: [*Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker*](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Eat-Your-Mind/Jason-McBride/9781982117023). There are many reasons why Kathy Acker, who died just about twenty-five years ago, was one of the greatest writers of her time, and why her work remains so relevant today. One of them is that Acker's novels involved cotinual explorations of, and challenges to, the very idea of personal identity. Acker understood our world to be one in which originality of any sort is rare and difficult (a situation which is ironically expressed through the exaltation of originality and innovation in every domain of social and cultural life). This is part of the reason why Acker's own texts are continually engaged in the appropriation, remixing, and reworking of previously existing texts; but the "texts" in question here are not just books that Acker had read, and movies that she had seen, but also her own familial and personal history. None of these fragments are "true" and "authentic" in their own right, but the very process of working through them produces something that, in its very provisionality and mutability, might be described as truer and more authentic than any more literally accurate statement could have been. For all of Acker's mystique as a punk feminist rebel, she was also deeply literary, deeply committed to and embedded in the processes of reading and writing. The hard thing is to grasp how these two aspects are not in fact radically opposed, but different aspects of the same molten process (in something of the same way that, for Spinoza, mind and body are two aspects of the same substance). Acker's tattoos and bodybuilding and sexual adventures were forms of writing, and her writing was a form of being embodied in the world.

Acker's novels and other texts still exist for us, and they certainly haven't been taken up, appreciated, and reworked in their own terms as they deserve to be. Bur I cannot dissociate them, at least in my own mind, from the person who Kathy Acker was, and who passed a quarter of a century ago. I only knew Kathy Acker casually, and not deeply or well; but she is the only person I have known in person (writer/artist or not) of whom I could say (as Norman Mailer said of William Burroughs) that she "may conceivably be [or, in this case, have been] possessed by genius." The phrse is right, because genius is not something that anybody *has*, but something that a few rare people may be *possessed by*, at certain occasional moments in time. It is tied up, not with identity -- there is a reason why Acker titled one of her novels *In Memoriam To Identity* -- but with how it slips aside and transforms, so that it is never whole and accomplished, but also never negligible or inexistent either. It is not a something, but not a nothing either (as Wittgenstein might say). It is always both consolidating and slipping away; it cannot be grasped substantially, but it also cannot be grasped dialectically -- but only obliquely. To quote Wallace Stevens (a poet in whom, as far as I know, Acker was not in the least bit interested), the author must escape from being "too exactly himself" [sic], and instead somehow manage to utter "speech we do not speak."

In all this, I am saying both too much, and not enough. I think that what I have written above is fairly accurate, as far as it goes, about Kathy Acker; but it only says the tiniest part of what she was about, or what she made, what her texts do and say. Though I have written about Acker's texts before, this is not a task to which I feel adequate. Yet I think that Jason McBride's book definitely helps in this regard. It is hyper-aware of all the issues that I have been raising -- issues that are front and center in Acker's own texts -- and yet it gives us some sense of who Acker was, *what she was like* -- despite the acknowledged difficulties of apprehending either other people or oneself. It seems to get the facts mostly right, as far as I am able to be aware; my only corrections are extremely picayune. Beyond that, it does give me something of a sense of Acker's living presence (even if that phrase can only hold partially and ironically, for reasons that I have already said).

If Kathy Acker had not died twenty-five years ago, she would be seventy five years old today. While I do not believe that wisdom somehow comes with age (at least not in my own case), I cannot help missing what Acker might have said, had she still been among us in this schizophrenic time. Not a month goes by when I do not think of her (or think of her absence), and McBride's biography has made me feel this all the more intensely.