Now, thanks to Chris Kraus’s thoughtful, sympathetic biography, the doubters can perhaps find their way towards an appreciation of this enfant terrible of late 20th-century American literature. Kraus is the perfect mediator for Acker, finding in her work an aesthetics of provocation, discomfiture, risk and radical empathy ... Writing in the present tense, Kraus employs italics when citing Acker’s work. It’s an effective technique, making it seem as if Acker were writing in a foreign language. Without quotation marks, Kraus’s voice slips almost unnoticed into Acker’s, which nicely echoes Acker’s appropriative work, and minimises the difference between biographer and subject. This feels like the right form for writing about Acker, who often blended texts with her own diary writings.

In many ways Kraus is Acker’s ideal biographer. But given her interest in making hidden structures visible it’s surprising that she doesn’t acknowledge her own relationship to her subject. Acker was the previous girlfriend of Kraus’s now ex-husband, Sylvère Lotringer, like Kraus an editor at the independent publisher Semiotext(e) and a frequent interlocutor here. Is it crass to point this out? It certainly complicates any objective perspective, and maybe it would have been better to state it plainly, especially since it’s logged in I Love Dick, the roman-à-clef that made Kraus famous. That said, Kraus reconstitutes Acker’s wanderings with real wit and beauty, understanding without pandering to the painfully high stakes of her identity games.

Kraus gives us an authoritative, narratively engaging, and highly readable story of a remarkable life. One that we might even recognize … Though Acker rehearsed her life story in her fiction and public persona, she remains a highly unreliable narrator. As Kraus notes, scholars regularly cite the myths Acker perpetuated in her life as if they were facts. In tackling those myths, After Kathy Acker will be required reading for Acker scholars and enthusiasts alike. The biographical clarity Kraus provides will also, I am sure, teach us new ways to read Acker’s novels, which are dense with intertextual references, excerpts from her diaries, and shocking scenes of sex and violence … After Kathy Acker allows readers to feel like they could have been Kathy, without feeling like they possess her...We are after Kathy Acker, in both senses of that word.

The book’s overall sensibility is that of a tense friendship, even a resentful one. Kraus does not clarify her personal relationship to her subject, and so the question of their relation becomes a void into which her tone rushes. Acker certainly doesn’t come off as an easy person to like. Kraus elevates this unlikeability to be the defining feature of her person ... To evoke a life you have to fill bits in with the flavor of the person, how it felt to be with her in a room. But over the course of this densely researched and detailed book, Kraus fills the spaces between these details with inferences which border on cruel ... we have literary appreciation and a sort of character condemnation working against each other in the same analytical moment ... Biography-writing is a very tricky form, and no reader could fault the dedication with which Kraus has chased down the archival and human remains of Kathy Acker on earth. As an Acker fan, I inhaled this book. But as the last pages turned, the biography’s lingering flavor was one of bitterness. Whether that was done in the name of the truth or in the name of dislike, we can’t know.

Chris Kraus did not love Kathy Acker, did not even ‘like’ her, though love and like are mean props in the perpetual war of letters. Kraus did think that this woman, who had slept with her (eventually ex-) husband (Sylvère Lotringer), was ‘kind of frightening and awesome’ … The only woman, according to Kraus, to achieve the status of ‘Great Writer as Countercultural Hero,’ Acker’s only real crime besides profligacy was ‘bad’ writing, by which I mean a refusal to tell a story straight … After Kathy Acker, while also being a sort of Before Chris Kraus, is a memorial or femmage to an era of big criticism’s great expectations, when maybe a certain playfulness with the morphology of truth could seem noble, beautiful, or at least innocent.

While most biographers regard the unpicking of untruths as central to their work, Kraus has a different approach. As the reader will shortly discover, her opening line is a get-out clause. If Acker did indeed lie 'all the time', as she also asserts, Kraus doesn’t necessarily see it as her job to dismantle those deceptions. At best, she is too credulous. At worst, she is haphazard, even lazy ... It’s not only that so many of the stories she tells about her are so hilarious (impossible to believe that Kraus doesn’t know that the majority of these anecdotes are way beyond satire). Rather, it’s that she singularly fails to make a case for Acker the writer ... She ends (and what a relief it is when that moment comes) with what I can only describe as a little hymn of identification with Acker. In a book full of baffling, queasy-making things, this is surely the most befuddling of all. Kraus, whose own novels are rather good, is so much the better writer, even if, this time around, her id seems sometimes to have wrestled her ego to the floor.

Kraus deftly sews up the gaps with thought-provoking and context-building information throughout the text, making for a pleasurable and informative read. One might even say that Kraus’s biography formally parallels Acker’s work, which hums with intentionality and indeterminancy ... Kraus’s prose glides by without feeling rushed. By seamlessly intermingling excerpts from Acker’s novels, interviews, and correspondence into her narrative, Kraus’ style mimics how Acker’s identity and art reciprocally fed off of each other in a way that made discernment between the two difficult. In lesser hands, this archive-rich biography might have wound up a convoluted narrative. But Kraus gives us a finely ordered account of Acker’s life that still acknowledges the challenge of telling a story that draws heavily from biography and experience. It is a book brimming with moments where reality and fiction meet, the boundaries between the two often blurred ... Though at times understandably dense, After Kathy Acker is proof that Kraus is the ideal person to tell Acker’s story. This critical biography is a wonderful read for long-time fans of both Acker and Kraus, and it will likely be an engaging one even for those unfamiliar with their work, but who are interested in the development and vicissitudes of an accomplished artist’s life.

Kraus, a nobody during Acker’s lifetime but now an author with fame comparable or even in excess of hers, is acutely sensitive to the expectations of her readers and Acker’s: our preconceptions are a powerful fog that envelops the work and pre-empts its revelations … Kraus engages with Acker’s myth, breaking it down and renewing it in ways that echo Acker’s own practice. In her life and writing, Acker engaged in experiments that allowed her to constantly fabricate new identities for herself: Kraus’s book in some ways builds on this endeavor, constructing yet another version of Acker...Kraus’s Acker is one calibrated to the contemporary moment and is portrayed as a vulnerable, somewhat lost, and not always likeable female artist desperately trying to make it in the world.

Kraus is a generous, admiring, but not uncritical narrator in this comprehensive biography ... Acker emerges here as a prolific self-mythologizer, but Kraus shows an impressive ability to clear away her subject’s fabrications while tracing Acker’s life from her upbringing on the Upper East Side of Manhattan to her death from breast cancer at 50. Without ever sensationalizing Acker’s personal history, Kraus explores Acker’s dysfunctional childhood and complicated sex life, which became the content of Acker’s inescapably autobiographical work. Kraus proves a master of her craft, displaying a wry sense of humor and giving fine-tuned close readings of Acker’s writing ... The book will excite fans of Acker, though those less interested in her work might find the level of detail heavy going.