K ATHY ACKER
An audacious author reflects upon the piratical genius of another
In the summer of 2017, I was lying on a sunlounger in Italy, failing to write a new book. The world had gone crazy, and I felt like I couldn’t keep up with the tide of atrocities rolling in on the news. Instead, I turned to my holiday reading: a biography of the writer and punk’s high priestess Kathy Acker. Immediately, I was electrified. I’d read her novels Great Expectations and Blood and Guts in High School as a teenager, but somehow I’d written them off as dated, stuck in the 1990s like her uniform of Jean Paul Gaultier and Vivienne Westwood.
Maybe it was because the world had changed, but there was nothing dated about her now. Her themes were hyper-violence, terrorism, sexual abuse: all the issues that were clotting my Twitter stream by the hour. I couldn’t believe her bravado or her courage. As a student in San Diego in the 1960s, she honed what would become a lifelong technique of radical plagiarism, a smash-and-grab raid on literature itself. She’d go to the library, pick a book, copy out the contents and transpose it into the first person, stealing Dickens and Don Quixote, re-purposing porn and pulp fiction to her own ends. She only got threatened with legal action once. Most of the writers she plundered understood that she was a collagist and a pirate, practising theft as a feminist virtue: the art of taking what you need.
I loved how not-nice she was, how wayward and how honest. Generally job-avoidant, she worked in the early 1970s in a live sex show in Times Square, and later as a stripper on the West Coast. Sex was a pleasure and an escape. It freed her in multiple ways, including by paying the rent, but it was also the cause of acute physical pain. From her early twenties, Acker suffered from chronic pelvic inflammatory disease, intensified by several abortions. She often wrote about the experience of the abortion clinic, and what it revealed about the place of women in society. In her version of Don Quixote, she even made it the initiation ritual for her female knight, the humiliating puke-green paper shift her armour. She wrote shamelessly about shame itself, undismayed by the reality of toxic power dynamics, only hell-bent on getting it down on the page.
That summer, I read my way through all her books, entering a territory of apocalyptic cities populated by marauding gangs and wild girls, lost in psychic landscapes that are dangerous and often deadly. They’re full of political fears, but they also feel emotionally resonant and weirdly alive. Acker died of breast cancer at the age of 50, leaving behind a body of work that’s shocking not because it’s cruel or vicious but because it is so entirely undeluded, so willing to record reality.
She inspired me so much that I stole from her – the greatest compliment I could give the master larcenist. I made her the central character of my novel Crudo, a real-time account of that turbulent summer from the perspective of a woman with a distinct resemblance to Acker. I even wove in her own writing, some of which she’d stolen in turn. Every line seemed to speak precisely to the world of Trump and Brexit. A president threatening nuclear war on Twitter would not have surprised her for a minute.
What did Acker do for me? She made me braver, she made me free. It’s funny to talk of generosity with a thief, but she wasn’t taking for herself. She was picking the lock for all of us.