“Why Can’t You Write Normal?”

In 2017, 20 years after the death of Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus published After Kathy Acker, an intimate portrayal of its subject en route to attaining “the iconic status of Great Writer as Countercultural Hero that Acker desperately craved. Until she achieved it,” Kraus writes, “no woman had.”

The following year, writer Olivia Laing joined the growing Acker revival with her own autofictional novel, Crudo, whose protagonist, Kathy, is a composite of both Acker and Laing. “Kathy had written several books—Great Expectations, Blood and Guts in High School, I expect you’ve heard of them.” Now journalist Jason McBride’s new, comprehensive biography, Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker, is set to further expand the pool of people interested in both Acker’s experimental, formally daring novels—some of which take their titles from Western classics—and her turbulent, and relentlessly ambitious, punk life.