EAT YOUR MIND

First full-scale authorized biography of the pioneering experimental novelist Kathy Acker, one of the most original and controversial figures in 20th-century literature.

Kathy Acker was a rare and almost inconceivable thing: a celebrity experimental writer. Twenty-five years after her death, she remains one of the most original, shocking, and controversial artists of her era. The author of visionary, transgressive novels like Blood and Guts in High School; Empire of the Senses; and Pussy, King of Pirates, Acker wrote obsessively about the treachery of love, the limitations of language, and the possibility of revolution. She was notorious for her methods - collaging together texts stolen from other writers with her own diaries, sexual fantasies, and blunt political critiques - as well as her appearance. With her punkish hairstyles, tattoos, and couture outfits she looked like no other writer before or after. Her work was exceptionally prescient, taking up complicated conversations about gender, sex, capitalism, and colonialism that continue today.

Acker's life was as unruly and radical as her writing. Raised in a privileged but oppressive Upper East Side Jewish family, she turned her back on that world as soon as she could, seeking a life of romantic and intellectual adventure that led her to, and through, many of the most thrilling avant-garde and countercultural moments in America: the births of conceptual art and experimental music; the poetry wars of the 60s and 70s; the mainstreaming of hardcore porn; No Wave cinema and New Narrative writing; Riot girls, biker chicks, cyberpunks. As this definitive biography shows, Acker was not just a singular writer, she was also a titanic cultural force who tied together disparate movements in literature, art, music, theatre, and film.

The book will be the first authorized and complete biography of the Acker, written with the full support and cooperation of her estate. It uses unrestricted access to her archives at Duke University and NYU; her 6000-volume personal library now housed at the University of Cologne; her manuscripts, journals and letters, as well as correspondence from several private collections. This book will be far more accessible and straightforward, aimed at a wider audience than any other book published prior on Acker. It will trace Acker's life in chronological order, with occasional personal and contextual moments gathered during McBride's research. And it will be just as much a cultural history, chronicling in depth the various bohemians through which Acker traveled.

Jason McBride has been a freelance journalist and editor for over a decade. His journalism and essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, New York, The Believer, New York, Slate, Village Voice, the Globe and Mail, Hazlitt and numerous other North American publications.