Remembering Kathy Acker

Writing is solitary work. It's also very earnest work. There's only so many ways to write something, anything, without it becoming boring, pretentious, or incomprehensible. Writing needs to be clear or at least readable in order to capture a reader's continuing interest. Writing also requires discipline -- just sitting down and doing it, over and over again, editing and rewriting your words into something comprehensible. 

It's not a surprise then that many writers are what we call "nerds" -- socially withdraw, socially awkward people interested more in a life of the mind than a life outside their door. It's also why the concept of the "reclusive writer" -- like JD Salinger or Harper Lee -- is so potent.

To be a writer is in a sense to be alone, to be apart, to observe and reflect the world rather that participate in it. To be its conscience instead of its muse. 

That's what makes the life and career of Kathy Acker so interesting. She was a writer but she was most certainly not a nerd. She was the closes thing a writer can be to a punk rocker -- her work is often called "experimental", "transgressive, "post-modern." She was a novelist and essayist, and dabbled in playwriting. Long before it became fashionable, she was writing about the long-term effects of childhood trauma, bisexuality, and the rebellious spirit. The titles to some of her work: "I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac", "Don Quixote: Which Was My Dream", "P@#$y, King of the Pirates", "Blood and Guts in High School", and her 1979 Pushcart Prize winning story "N.Y.C. in 1979". She also wrote things with titles that were subversively conventional: "Great Expectations" and "Florida." 

Born in NYC in 1947, Kathy Acker grew up in a privileged but troubled home on Sutton Place. She was one of those New Yorkers who was from the city but who found more of a voice on the West Coast, eventually migrating to San Francisco before moving to London. She would return to live in NYC on occasion but, after a cancer diagnosis, she became a fan of alternative medicine, dying in an "alternative cancer clinic" in 1997, aged 50. 

Kathy lived a wild, exhausting life. She was no hermit. While a prolific writer, she also taught writing classes, held odd jobs, moved around constantly, married twice, and had many affairs with both men and women. She was openly bi at a time when few weren't. She even, allegedly, appeared in adult movies. 

Kathy Acker was, in short, a restless spirit. And now, more than 25 years after her death, her work still resonates. She has been the subject of not one but two biographies, one called After Kathy Acker, the other called Eat Your Mind. 

I will admit that I never heard of Kathy Acker until I stumbled across these biographies. She was a little before my time. But I became intrigued.

Writers like Kathy Acker or Ernest Hemingway or Hunter S. Thompson or Charles Bukowski and Jack Kerouac have always inspired me with awe. These were people who had wild lives, myriad experiences, lived life at 100 miles an hour -- and yet still found the time and energy and peace of mind to sit down and do the hard, solitary work of writing. They travelled extensively, drank and did drugs, had lots of sex, met lots of people, did all sorts of things -- and wrote. How they did all that and could still write brilliantly and earn a living is stunning to me. 

Talking about "experimental" or "transgressive writing", I like to think that this blog is just that. But probably not. It's not up to me or any writer to declare themselves that, only the public. But, for Kathy Acker, the public most certainly did.