★ 08/15/2022
Critic McBride investigates novelist Kathy Acker’s fiery personality and artistic inspiration in this comprehensive biography. McBride shows how Acker, who died in 1997, became a beloved name in experimental writing communities for her fragmentary novels depicting sexual promiscuity, queerness, prostitution, trauma, and incest. McBride finds it to be more than sensationalism: “For all of her books’ vivid vulgarity, they asked fundamental questions. How do I cope with the pain of being unloved? What is good art? What is art good for? What knowledge exists outside our conscious minds?” Five sections, starting at Acker’s birth in Manhattan in 1947 and ending at her funeral, cover about a decade each and examine the changes and developments in Acker’s personal and professional lives. Though McBride accepts that certain details of Acker’s biography must be “enclosed in quotation marks” because of her belief that “binary divisions between fantasy and reality... are false”), he manages to bring together her diaries, novels, poems, plays, and letters with reminiscences from her friends, lovers, and collaborators for a full portrait of her life. To McBride, inconsistencies or contradictions are revealing: “She didn’t seek to be solved. Holes are escape routes, openings. They lead to unknown possibilities.” The result is an excellent addition to American literary history. (Nov.)
"[A] wholly unique, insightful look at Acker, whose work remains highly relevant today.”—Book Riot
"In this brisk, lively book, we learn that Acker was skeptical of autobiography yet drew repeatedly from her own life; felt liberated by the literary canon but also trapped by it; desperately needed people yet often pushed them away. McBride, who has thoroughly researched his subject’s life, doesn’t aim to resolve these contradictions, explaining that Acker ‘didn’t seek to be solved.'"—The New Yorker
"[S]mart and sympathetic"—The New York Times
“Critic McBride investigates novelist Kathy Acker’s fiery personality and artistic inspiration in this comprehensive biography...[H]e manages to bring together her diaries, novels, poems, plays, and letters with reminiscences from her friends, lovers, and collaborators for a full portrait of her life...The result is an excellent addition to American literary history.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Journalist McBride makes his book debut with a perceptive, thoroughly researched biography of the experimental writer Kathy Acker...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.” —Kirkus Review
“[T]he real genius of Jason McBride’s Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker is his ability to use her life as a prism to sketch a cultural history, rather than a literary analysis, and provide adequate attention to underappreciated movements and artists who are arbiters of the current and future trends of literature. . ."—Forever Magazine
"Kathy Acker was a brilliant bundle of fascinating contradictions, and one of the brightest stars in a period when New York was the world center of creativity. Jason McBride has written a sympathetic, studious biography. He deserves every award for the depth of his research and the verve of his writing."—Edmund White, winner of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters
"At times hilarious, at other times a tear-jerker, Eat Your Mind elucidates Kathy Acker’s complex genius in all its outrageous, tender, brutal glory. Jason McBride has written a page-turner worthy of hyperbole. A tour de force!"—Dodie Bellamy, author of Bee Reaved
"A great and timely biography of Kathy Acker. Unafraid to celebrate the complex intellectual histories that form both outer skin and inner guts of Acker's work, her interweaving of ideology and aesthetics, her passionate conviction that the avant-garde was something to be lived as much as written, McBride has produced a study genuinely faithful to his brilliant, difficult subject."—Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder
"Writers' lives are seldom of much biographical interest, but Kathy Acker's had enough incident for a shelf of novels. She was as singular, passionate, and complex in her life as she was in her work, and Jason McBride accounts for it all with admirable thoroughness and equanimity, in lucid and dispassionate prose."—Lucy Sante, author of Low Life
"An elegant, engaging account of one of the twentieth century’s most important writer-bandits, which traces the twists and turns of her life with great empathy and sensitivity. Eat Your Mind is a feast, full of delicious anecdotes and tasty scraps of previously unpublished material, and a master class in writing the biography of a subject who is always trying to slip the net of narrative."—Lauren Elkin, author Flâneuse
“This book is going to be a barn-burner, the literary biography of the year.”—Jeet Heer, The Nation
2022-09-24
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.
