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Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker

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“It’s shocking to learn that this is McBride’s first book... Eat Your Mind does everything a good biography should and more” —Los Angeles Times

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

Kathy Acker (1947–1997) was a rare and almost inconceivable 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 critique—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 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 grrrls, biker chicks, cyberpunks. As this definitive, “sympathetic, studious” (Edmund White, winner of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters) 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.

A feat of literary biography, Eat Your Mind draws on exclusive interviews with hundreds of Acker’s intimates as well as her private journals, correspondence, and early drafts of her work, acclaimed journalist and critic Jason McBride, offers a thrilling account and a long-overdue reassessment of a misunderstood genius and revolutionary artist.

416 pages, Hardcover

First published November 29, 2022

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Jason McBride

20 books6 followers

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Displaying 1 - 30 of 39 reviews
Profile Image for Alwynne.
721 reviews925 followers
July 7, 2022
Jason McBride’s painstaking biography of author and artist Kathy Acker treads a fine line between gossipy and analytical but really strives to put Acker’s life and work into its broader social and cultural contexts. So, at times, this is as much an overview of the avant-garde/countercultural scene in 70s and 80s America, and London, as it is a close-up on Acker. From the start, McBride makes it clear Acker has great personal resonance for him; but at the same time, he’s careful not to allow that sense of connection to lapse into hagiography or extended fan’s homage.

In recent years Acker, who died relatively young, has taken on iconic status, her persona resurrected through the pages of writers like Olivia Laing, and her sometimes-daunting prose enshrined in classic imprints, yet her complex, collagistic novels and stories can seem inaccessible. McBride’s particularly adept at balancing Acker’s complicated, frequently, messy personal life with the architecture of her actual writings: tracing her literary influences; her interest in performance art; her desire to transgress or even explode traditional genre boundaries and forms, and her willingness to experiment with style and form even if the result might be a failure. Although there are times here when the sheer wealth of detail can be a little dry or overwhelming - particularly for readers less familiar with the literary and artistic movements Acker intersected with.

McBride chronicles Acker’s unlikely journey from a difficult, conventional childhood in the 1940s and 50s, through to her later stints as a sex worker; periods spent in New York and LA where she forged friendships with writers like Bernadette Mayer, Dennis Johnson and Lynne Tillman as well as artists, film-makers and composers like Laurie Anderson. He follows Acker to London where she moved seemingly effortlessly between mainstream and avant-garde circles, becoming close to emerging authors like Hanif Kureishi and Neil Gaiman. And finallly to her harrowing, final years in the US. Acker’s a challenging subject, a mercurial figure, whose evolving queer identity and rejection of traditional gender roles can seem curiously modern while other aspects of her expression and opinions seem better left in the past. But McBride makes a strong case for her continued relevance.

Overall, a well-researched, lucid, often-fascinating exploration of Acker’s development as a writer and of the writing itself with its foundations in an eclectic mix of the avant-garde, the theoretical and the semi-autobiographical. Writing which often appears closer to the realms of conceptual art - as does Acker herself.

Thanks to Edelweiss plus and publisher Simon & Schuster for an ARC
Profile Image for Jeff Jackson.
Author 4 books502 followers
January 5, 2023
Brilliant. It takes her fiction seriously and details the many literary, artistic, and musical scenes that inspired her throughout her life. This is the wide-ranging, sympathetic, and clear-eyed biography that Acker deserves.
Profile Image for Drea.
586 reviews8 followers
November 27, 2022
I read a lot - a lot. I picked up this book because of the author, the brilliant James McBride, knowing absolutely nothing about Kathy Acker. I hadn’t heard of her, despite my 54 years. What a revelation this book is - how fun for me that I get to now read Acker’s works after reading this incredible biography. McBride is such a good writer - I was captivated from beginning to end. Thanks to Simon and Schuster for the advanced copy. What a gift.
Profile Image for Megan.
157 reviews43 followers
November 28, 2022
Thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for the advanced reader copy.

This week’s headline? Blood and guts

Why this book? I love Kathy Acker

Which book format? ARC

Primary reading environment? Chilled out on the couch

Any preconceived notions? I’m learning some new things about Acker

Identify most with? n/a

Three little words? “elaborate dream maps” “scoured, stunned, ravage”

Goes well with? Blood and Guts in High School and Empire of the Senseless

Recommend this to? Writers without borders

Other cultural accompaniments: https://youtu.be/2w0eikbVNpw

Grade: 4/5

I leave you with this: “She became a writer in spite of writing.”

“I couldn’t keep track of her because she was moving so much.”

📚📚📚

I was introduced to Kathy Acker back in 2010 and wasn’t sure what I was reading at first. Acker’s writing is fierce, erotic, raw. Punk. Experimental. This biography encapsulates her life and writing, how intelligent and complicated she was. She was a force to be reckoned with and I wish I could’ve met her. This bio is for people like me, those who love her books or are at least familiar with her work and have an interest in the artists that have surrounded her.

Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker will be available November 29, 2022.
Profile Image for Monica.
Author 6 books27 followers
December 28, 2022
I enjoyed reading this so much, for so many reasons. To begin with, Jason McBride has done an amazing job of telling Acker's story, having interviewed so many people and conducted so much research. I really admire the work that went into this book.
But I think as with anything about Kathy Acker and her work, much of my enjoyment of this book was, frankly, narcissistic enjoyment. Reading about Acker's work reminds me of when I first encountered it, as well as when I encountered the work of her fellow artists. And of my own bohemianish experiences. Part of my enjoyment of reading this was to feel reconnected to my many younger selves, as I read about Acker's different selves.
Profile Image for Brett Glasscock.
180 reviews10 followers
February 18, 2023
picked up on a whim after only reading "blood and guts in high school" and vaguely knowing acker's reputation. this was sooooo good. gonna go deep dive all her work now
Profile Image for Lulu Rehman.
75 reviews
October 12, 2023
I did it. I finally finished it. A 2 month journey and I’m at the end. Pretty good, but in this situation I had a deadline and it was more about the destination than the journey.
Profile Image for J Earl.
2,151 reviews95 followers
August 4, 2022
Eat Your Mind from Jason McBride is probably as complete of a biography of Kathy Acker as we'll ever get. In piecing together everything available the reader gets a wonderful view of a singular talent.

Contrary to what you might hear, this isn't really a "gossipy" biography, unless one considers using the gossip the subject used in creating various personas being gossipy. But as for McBride's writing itself, it is not gossipy. That said, when collecting contradictory comments from Acker, interviews with friends, and the wealth of written material, McBride has no choice in places but to make educated guesses. He does make it clear that this will be a biography with holes, and that is just how Acker would have wanted it.

While anyone with an interest in Acker's work will find a lot to enjoy here, I think the book is written in such an engaging manner that even someone less familiar with her, but with an interest in reading biographies, will also find the book rewarding. In other words, you don't need to have a lot of knowledge of Acker to appreciate this as a biography. Those with an interest in her, however, will find a lot to help them better understand, or at least begin to understand, her.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
Profile Image for Liz Worth.
Author 10 books57 followers
January 3, 2023
An amazing biography. I am a huge Kathy Acker fan and was so excited to read this book about her. It did not disappoint.

I read a lot of biographies and one of the things I dread the most whenever I read a new one is that it will just turn into a laundry list of events: "This happened, and then that happened, and then this other thing occurred."

I was so happy that Eat Your Mind does not fall into this habit. Jason McBride maintains deep emotional threads throughout the book that keeps the story moving. Beautifully told, Eat Your Mind strikes the perfect balance between the inner workings of a complicated artist and the linear timelines of her life.

I was inspired from beginning to end by this book and will be keeping it on my shelf to re-read in the future.
Profile Image for Francesca Penchant.
103 reviews18 followers
June 12, 2023
"I now fully knew what I didn't want and what and whom I hated. That was something... One day, maybe, there'ld be a human society in a world which is beautiful, a society which wasn't just disgust."
—Kathy Acker, last paragraph of “Empire of the Senseless”
Profile Image for Angela.
530 reviews7 followers
December 6, 2022
This was fantastic and heartbreaking, much like Acker herself. This is a must for any serious Acker fan.
Profile Image for Ben Romero.
51 reviews
January 5, 2023
Kathy Acker in tha whip wit tha schizo-kids & Francophiles like vroooooooooooooommmm <3
Profile Image for Becca Younk.
488 reviews38 followers
July 10, 2023
I think this is the best kind of biography, by someone who is clearly a fan of the author, yet also can write objectively and present the author as a complicated person. I'm hugely interested in the late 60s and 70s culture in New York, like the beginnings of punk rock and Andy Warhol's Factory. But I had never heard of Kathy Acker! She fits in perfectly with the attitude and aesthetics that I like from that time period, yet also she walked the walk. She didn't just write about sex work, drugs, violence, and abuse, she also experienced all of those things, many times out of necessity, not because she was slumming it. There's a lot of names in this book, like, a lot. I don't really have a solution either, because McBride can't possibly stop and introduce every single person, but also it's important to show how many people Acker knew and was around. In any case, Acker is fascinating, I have two of her novels and I can't wait to become obsessed with her.
Profile Image for Olivia.
157 reviews5 followers
Read
September 12, 2023
I don’t read a lot of biographies but idc this is by far the best biography I have ever read - kathy is treated with a lot of literary respect, & it’s clear that Jason McBride is a fan of her work, but we also get a picture of how she kind of sucked a lot of the time. I am so fascinated by her life & am rly excited to work her into my new story!!!! Kathy Ackers ghost living underground

It was just a rly beautiful tender & thoughtful biography
Profile Image for Pelle "NOT HERE" Parrafin.
70 reviews50 followers
Read
December 22, 2023
dear google it's me, margaret, is it possible to plagiarize kathy acker no i mean in a spiritual sense but does it make sense as a question is what i want to know and if not what does it make and also are my stuffed animals similar to hers or were they other species and what species were her stuffed animals and who inherited them?
354 reviews
March 6, 2023
I've never read Kathy Acker but always meant to and this was a solid biography that gave both a strong sense of who she was as a person and where her work fits culturally and historically. Also I'll say that while at times she was a repellent, narcissistic jerk (on the page anyway), I also grew to love her in a certain way, and the final chapter was truly moving and deeply sad.
Profile Image for Mikey.
243 reviews
May 3, 2023
LITERATURE in PUNK ROCK - Book #42

BOOK: Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker (2022)
BAND: Bikini Kill

In May of 1989, a junior at Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Washington, named Kathleen Hanna travelled to Seattle to meet Kathy Acker, a forty-two-year-old author she admired. Acker, who had written about abuse, incest, and other forms of sexual extremity, was conducting workshops at the Center on Contemporary Art.

Kathleen Hanna, then nineteen, bluffed her way into an interview. As reported in Sara Marcus’s carefully documented history, “Girls to the Front,” when Hanna explained that she was interested in spoken-word performance and in writing, Acker told her that she should be in a band:

“There’s more of a community for musicians than for writers.” Hanna felt rebuffed at first, but she ultimately took the advice. In 1990, after touring with a band called Viva Knievel, she formed a new group, eventually called Bikini Kill...(1)

———————--

In Girls to the Front, Hanna discusses her experience of reading Blood and Guts for the first time, saying: “I was just writing all this crazy shit and I thought I was totally insane. … And I got Blood and Guts in High School from one of my photo teachers, and I totally felt like, Oh, I’m not crazy! It was such a confidence builder for me. I wasn’t even sure what kind of artist I was going to be, like if I was a writer or a photographer or what. But it made me feel like these other women had done this amazing shit and I could too” (2).

OTHER BOOKS READ IN SEQUENCE FOR THIS REVIEW:
- Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker
- Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution by Sara Marcus

FURTHER SUPPLEMENTAL READING:
1. Frere-Jones, Sasha. "Hanna and her Sisters." The New Yorker 26 (2012).
2. Ioanes, Anna. "Shock and Consent in a Feminist Avant-Garde: Kathleen Hanna Reads Kathy Acker." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 42, no. 1 (2016): 175-197.
Profile Image for Joe Handley.
142 reviews13 followers
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June 26, 2023
I feel like this is probably the most thorough and complete biography of Kathy Acker that we’ll ever get to read. It's the perfect mix between first-hand accounts given by people who knew Kathy, her work and what it was saying about her life at the time, the highs and lows of her personal and professional relationships, as well as the absolute driving force that Acker carved herself into being.

This isn’t a book that will have all the answers on Kathy Acker. You will not come away from it feeling like you really know who Kathy Acker is – and I feel like that unknowable feeling is the only true way to know Acker at all. McBride says as much himself – educated guesses are needed in places. Even close friends, people Kathy stayed in touch with throughout her life are still questioning some of the choices she made and why she could be so unassuming. Acker is an enigma who brings with her a lot of confusion and uncertainty. No matter the book, if it involves Kathy Acker, there are sure to be some holes.

Any and all biographies tend to finish out on a sad note, and this book is no different. It feels particularly sad with Kathy Acker, however. A life as flowerful and eventful as Acker’s doesn’t feel right to have ended so early, with Kathy fighting tooth and nail until the end, almost refusing to even believe that she was dying until it was too difficult to mask and hide.

I just hope that Acker's work will allow her to live on. I hope it lives on especially in people like herself - those who have an unshakeable belief in what they do and love. It’s our job as readers to push the waves of Kathy Acker into the present-day zeitgeist.
Profile Image for R.J. Gilmour.
Author 2 books21 followers
February 8, 2023
Just finished Jason McBride's biography of the poet/novelist Kathy Acker. Way back in the 1980s Acker was one of those people who floated around the fringes of my world but I never really knew that much about her or work. McBride's biography helps place Acker not only in the larger context of 20th-century literature but also in all the worlds that she inhabited. Acker straddled the worlds of poetry, the downtown art scene, literature, punk & emerging academic theory about identity & gender. An easy read McBride's books is a well-researched & fascinating at a woman who was constantly trying to understand herself & her place in the world around her. Reading the book also helped me understand a few women who I knew from that period who seemed to have patterned their own lives after Acker's.

"Sex fascinated her, as a sour of personal, complicated pleasure, but also as a way to understand power, gender, the self." xiii

"Autobiography is supposed to be the 'truthful' account of one's life. I quickly realized that the more truthful I try to be in language, the more I lie. One immediately comes up to language and learns either to be defeated or to let language fuck one, to fuck with language. To lie down. This is what I call 'fiction.'" xx

"She was like a cuckoo in the wrong nest. She landed in the wrong place." 23

"...the actual physical pleasure was of course minimal compared to the pleasure of becoming who I wanted to become..." 26

"I have a natural imp tendency to want to destroy." 93
Profile Image for Lelia.
244 reviews2 followers
January 14, 2023
I have to admit that a big chunk in the middle of this book wasn’t particularly interesting to me. Perhaps because I’m not familiar with the scene Acker was so immersed in, and I haven’t read her books. Lists of names that meant little to me and Acker’s own tendency to have brief, unhappy relationships made much of the story a tedious blur.

One thing I found striking is that despite her determination to be unconventional, much of Acker’s life is rather boring. Just as porn can get boring and repetitive, Kathy’s patterns - in romances, squabbles, anxiety, family drama - played out over and over. She seemed very mired in her wounds and, as a friend of hers points out, she “ended up becoming her own jailer,” creating from the same pain even after it was stale. I think Carolyn Myss would call this woundology - which reveals my own penchant for New Age theories:)

However, I was completely engaged in the beginning of the book and the end of the book (once she starts teaching at San Francisco Art Institute), and Acker’s fierce urge to create something real and different is truly inspiring. I loved the descriptions of her notebooks and her process of collage/assemblage with words. What’s more, I find this book has wormed its way into my mind and I’m still thinking about it - and Kathy Acker - after finishing it.
Profile Image for Jenna Evans.
Author 1 book16 followers
February 4, 2023
This book sat unopened on my nightstand for months because Chris Krause's 'After Kathy Acker' was not simply a character assassination, but a grotesque and unforgivable attempt to erase Acker's work from literary history, and it so depressed me that I felt that I couldn't bear another word on the subject. But McBride's book is a delight. Without glossing over Acker's shortcomings, he approaches the story of her life with the energy and passion that characterized her presence and her writing. I don't think he really groks what being hated by your own mother does to a person; but what's more salient is that he understands what it meant to Acker's work. And, he really understands the nuances of why/how her writing is still so important -- and he knows *how* to read her, which I hope will help future generations of readers to find their way to it and through it and into it. Moreover, it's a really fun, engaging read -- I carried it into the bathtub with me.
Profile Image for AnnieM.
459 reviews21 followers
February 8, 2023
Kathy Acker was an enigmatic person even to those who thought they knew her well -- the author, Jason McBride does a marvelous job trying to put together a puzzle without all of the pieces - he calls it a biography with holes. But even with that, I feel I got incredible insights and glimpses into Kathy the person and Kathy the artist. He was able to access information from her journals as well as interviews with former lovers, friends and artists. Not everyone has something nice to say which makes this less of a hagiography and more of a balanced and complex view into her life. I had some familiarity with Kathy's work before reading this and after reading this, it got me curious about diving deeper into some of her writings. Given this is the author's first book, I am really impressed at how well he pulled this complex portrait of an artist together. I recommend this book.

Thank you to Netgalley and Simon & Schuster for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.
Profile Image for Solita.
202 reviews4 followers
July 2, 2023
I have mixed feelings about Acker. I will have to read Great Expectations again, it's been a long time. It's the only Acker I have read. I remember being confused by it, that it felt like messy writing, sort of like Myles, whom I much admire anyway. I haven't decided how I feel about Acker "stealing" from great literature to create her own literature. I also don't get the S&M thing, but it's a thing some folks are into, and I won't judge. I got a good feel for who Acker was from reading this biography. She was not nice, self-centered, and manipulative, sounds like. But it's her writing that matters to me, and I'm still trying to determine for myself how I feel about Acker and her work. I don't like it, but that's because I'm not interested in the subject she savors, nor do I understand her point. With a little more time and study, I might find I am right, that there isn't anything of real value, or I might discover what I'm missing and finally admire Acker.
Profile Image for Danielle.
2,507 reviews1 follower
March 1, 2023
*ARC was provided by Simon & Schuster through Netgalley.

This took me forever to finish because it made me realize that while I didn't know of Acker before picking this up, I really don't like her as a person (and can't speak to her writing). It's hard to call her a feminist when she sees almost every woman as a potential threat to the man she's with, and complains about being poor when she actually has a bunch of money. This shows that she had a complex life that resulted in her being the way she was, but I don't think it does enough to challenge the shitty way she treated other people, instead of it being just one component of her career.
Profile Image for Elaine Rumboll.
25 reviews2 followers
May 17, 2023
I stopped reading this tome on page 228/721 - after her treatment of DeJong. Found her deeply unlikeable, cruel, unkind, expedient. And to be honest, didn't like her writing much either. So here's to exiting long reads on people who if it was in their favour, would probably eat their own minds and not even notice the damage.

As her own fame grew, it seemed that the only other writers she could tolerate for long were young, emerging, and preferably fawning ones, or those who were more famous or powerful than she.

Excerpt From: "Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker" by Jason McBride. Scribd.
10 reviews
April 16, 2023
Thank you for this review. I finished the book this morning. I had never even heard of Kathy Acker but the book was one of my random finds at my sleepy little branch of the St. Louis Public Library. One way I rate or rank a reading experience is by how much I’m inspired to explore other subjects, authors and books. This book generated quite a lost. I look forward to whatever Jason McBride tackles next.
Profile Image for Nicodemus Boffin.
20 reviews1 follower
February 3, 2023
Very well done. The biographer's sharply paced writing balances a lively narrative of Acker's tempestuous personal life with a smartly critical assessment of Acker's writings and other works. The audiobook's narrator does a very good job keeping the listener attentive and engaged. Highly recommended.
Profile Image for sparky.
37 reviews
April 20, 2023
mcBirde's prose is lacking but acker's turbulent and glistening life breaks through. his dedication and admiration of her are clear through his splicing of gossip, journal entries, and anecdotes. acker is the blue print for the BPD Art Hoe and countless drab autofictions, but no one could do it like her.
Profile Image for Sian Lile-Pastore.
1,283 reviews172 followers
September 5, 2023
I loved this so much !
Such a great biography - one that is clear eyed about Acker's flaws, and celebrates her fascinating life and commitment to literature, taking Acker as a writer as seriously as she deserves.
Also made me want to read her books, want to read other books and writers mentioned and led me down many a rabbit hole.
Wonderful.
Profile Image for A.
1,084 reviews
February 3, 2023
McBride captures the complicated intricacy of Kathy Acker's life, the myriad of people she was involved with and the inspirations and motivations behind her writing. This was a behemoth of a book, ceaseless in it's energy to convey a complicated individual.
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