I Want Everything

The Kathy Acker story tends to multiply as you write it.

- JASON MCBRIDE. SIMON & SCHUSTER

In the 1961 yearbook from the Lenox School, the posh Manhattan girls’ school that Kathy Acker attended, every student’s photo was accompanied by a personal motto. Acker, then in her early teens, chose Virgil: omnia vincit amor—“love conquers all.” Now the phrase seems a fitting epigraph to the writer’s too-short life, albeit one that would be complicated and torqued in the decades to come. Just as the characters in her books undergo unexpected transformations, so too did Acker in her many guises as an uptown prep-school girl, Times Square sex worker, weightlifting punk-feminist icon, darling of the London literati, and more. Through all this, as Jason McBride writes in Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker, it was love— torturous and sublime, violent and enlivening—that remained at the core of her work and her way of living.

Acker, an experimental novelist, performer, and essayist, resisted the reduction of narrative. In turn, the difficulty of writing a singular story about her has shaped McBride’s book. It’s an exciting ride: critical, admiring, and fascinating if not totally revelatory. 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 from the 1970s to the ’90s. McBride also quotes Acker’s own caution against biographical curiosity from what is perhaps her most famous novel, Blood and Guts in High School (1984): “Don’t get into the writer’s personal life thinking if you like the books you’ll like the writer. A writer’s personal life is horrible and lonely. Writers are queer so keep away from them.”