Smart and sympathetic but hardheaded ... McBride’s book follows Chris Kraus’s 2017 biography, After Kathy Acker. Kraus is a powerfully original writer, and her book is quirkier ... McBride is more dispassionate.
Brisk, lively book ... Though Eat Your Mind is billed as the first 'full-scale authorized biography,' it tells much the same story, using many of the same sources, as Chris Kraus does in her 2017 book, After Kathy Acker. The main difference is tonal: whereas Kraus...writes with the ambivalence of an intimate, McBride writes with the adulation of a fan ... While McBride tends to forgive Acker’s indiscretions, Kraus can be critical.
McBride is a card-carrying member of the Acker cult. But he’s also ready to acknowledge her problematic moments, of which there were more than a few ... It’s shocking to learn that this is McBride’s first book. He’s magnanimous when it comes to Acker’s critics, and he can paint a picture of New York’s queer art scene almost as vividly as Cynthia Carr in Fire in the Belly, her biography of the artist David Wojnarowicz. But Carr was one of Wojnarowicz’s friends. McBride never knew Acker. Eat Your Mind effectively interlaces Acker’s books with the events in her life. Even more crucially, it places her in the grand scheme of letters ... Eat Your Mind does everything a good biography should and more.
It’s an exciting ride: critical, admiring, and fascinating if not totally revelatory. In the end, it feels like containing Acker between two neat covers is not just difficult, but impossible. Eat Your Mind often feels chaotically jam-packed with people, texts, and fascinating but compressed social histories of the wild literary and artistic scenes of New York, London, and San Francisco in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s ... There are productive moments when McBride admits to not being sure what to believe. The book fluctuates between factual certainty (confirming or clarifying some events familiar from Acker’s self-mythology), open-ended speculation and detective work based on the textual evidence she left, and the vivid memories, both good and bad, of those who knew her...But there are also times when he seems to crave unmediated closeness with his subject, a questionable goal ... Perhaps it’s Acker’s sense of frenetic atomization that makes Eat Your Mind itself both compulsively readable and maddening. Due to the sheer volume of books and people that comprised the fabric of Acker’s life, the book might have offered a little more help to readers and scholars of her work — like a condensed timeline of her published and unpublished works, or a timeline of her own reading, or even a map of her complicated and far-reaching social, romantic, and professional entanglements. At the same time, compiling something as straightforward as that could grate against Acker’s own work and ideas ... best read alongside other Acker-inspired works that have come out in the last several years ... To read McBride’s biography as just one of many different versions of Acker’s story seems fitting — as a supplement to her own lifelong project of creating endlessly refracted images of the self.
... comprehensive ... 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.
To spotlight oneself takes ambition – it takes rather more to immolate one’s self. Thanks to Jason McBride’s definitive new biography, Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker, we now have in our hands an account of the genesis of Acker’s ambition and the work it sparked ... One of the dangers of biography as a genre is it can render its subject banal – it turns out Great Writers wipe their asses like everyone else. In puncturing the image Acker crafted for spectacular consumption, McBride gives us something more: a narrative account of the struggle of one woman to extend and inflect the trajectory of modernist writing in the late twentieth century. Her aim was to divert its course toward the self-dissolving kind of freedom, which among other things might be a freedom not so much against as beyond the reach of patriarchy.
Sumptuously detailed biography ... Part of the agenda of Chris Kraus’s biography was to draw back the curtains on Kathy the star, showing the extent of the supporting cast. McBride, too, is at pains to demonstrate that she wasn’t totally sui generis ... McBride has a nice phrase for Acker’s novels. He calls them unusually inhospitable to their readers ... Both Kraus and McBride counterbalance her untimely and confusing death...with a rousing account of the writers and artists she inspired.
McBride revisits readings and introductions, giving us a sense of her writing life ... McBride’s deep research and respect for his subject pays homage to her importance and introduces a new generation of readers to her unmatched vision.
Comprehensive ... [McBride] 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.
... perceptive, thoroughly researched ... 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.
