EAT YOUR MIND

The tumultuous life of a singular artist.

Journalist McBride makes his book debut with a perceptive, thoroughly researched biography of the experimental writer Kathy Acker (1947-1997), self-identified as queer, whose publications included 13 “groundbreaking novels,” two novellas, screenplays, poetry, libretti, essays, and criticism. In 1988, McBride, then a college sophomore at the University of Toronto, heard her read and was mesmerized both by Acker’s tattooed muscles and “her fusion of sex and literature, the streets and the academy.” Her iconoclastic works featured a heady collage of “scenes, phrases, characters, and ideas from texts both canonical and otherwise,” juxtaposed with “shards of her own diaries, sexual fantasies, gossip, political screeds, and blunt critiques of capitalism, liberalism, patriarchy, and language.” She also clawed at childhood wounds caused by a cold, controlling mother and a father, she was stunned to learn, who was really a stepfather. Acker’s biological father had abandoned her mother when she was three months pregnant. The “seesaw of seduction and betrayal” that began in childhood became a lifelong torment. McBride recounts Acker’s love affairs, sexual liaisons, two failed marriages, “semi-regular abortions,” sex work, and emotional afflictions—depression, anxiety, fear of abandonment—all of which fueled the writing that McBride closely examines. “She wrote,” McBride asserts, “to figure out why she acted in certain ways, why she thought in certain ways, how her memory worked, how experience was perceived and processed and represented.” Furthermore, “she wrote to complicate herself.” Acker could be infuriatingly self-absorbed and needy. “She pushed people away as soon as they came close,” writes McBride, “and then resented them for leaving her alone.” Even when she attained literary success, she insisted she was “an outcast, a traumatized street kid who had overcome enormous pain and adversity.” Informed by Acker’s published works, private papers, and many interviews, McBride presents a persuasive case for her enduring significance as “an icon of unorthodoxy.”

A brisk, engaging literary biography.