Kathy Acker, 1947-1997

ArtForum, March, 1998 by Amy Scholder

Throughout her life's work, Acker retold the story of her life, pointing out over and over that it is through the body that one comes to the deepest meanings, pleasures, epiphanies, and agonies. She talked about the body, her body of work, fueled by imagination and will. What is this life's work? Who was Kathy Acker? These are evocatively the same question: Electra, Pussy the Pirate, Laure, O, Pip, Pasolini, Janey, Kathy.

Many of those who knew her over the years heard different, contradictory versions of her life story. Certain things can be said here. She was raised, with her half-sister Wendy, by her mother and stepfather in New York. She went to school in Boston and San Diego, at various times called London, New York City, and San Francisco her home. She was prolific, the author often novels, a book of essays, an opera libretto, and a screenplay. She recorded with bands. She felt abandoned by a father she never knew, and by her mother, who committed suicide. She wrote fierce sexual content in her books, and had fierce sexual relationships. Her friendships were volatile, predicated both on her hunger for camaraderie and her fear of rejection.

When she was first diagnosed with cancer in 1996, her alternative treatment included a psychotherapeutic process that brought her back to the womb. She re-created the story of her origins, coming to terms with the early trauma of her mother's rejection. This revision, she believed, would save her life. (See Acker's essay, 'The Gift of Disease," http://acker.the hub.com.au/gift.html.) I stayed with Kathy in the hospital in Tijuana, two weeks before she died. Undergoing an invasive procedure to drain her lung, she saw in my face what she did not want to see: grief. To revise this moment, she sweetly reassured me: I am going to be okay. I am going to write another book. It will be called Girls With Diseases.

Who knows what that book would have been like? Surely a new body of work would have been informed by the intense spiritual awakening of her final months. Kathy had lived her life fearlessly, perhaps because she had only these fears: that her work would not be taken seriously, and that she would die alone.

Already revered, Kathy Acker is our Rimbaud, our Gertrude Stein, our Jane Bowles. (We always talked about feeling more comfortable in the rock-'n'-roll world than in the publishing world). She is my Janis Joplin and my Prince.

In those final weeks she was encircled with adoration. We knew that her contribution to the world - her brilliance, her integrity, her revolutionary poetics, her vulnerability, her sense of adventure, her grand personal style - was immeasurable. "Remember: it comes down. One must go down to see. Down into language. Once upon a time there was a writer; his name was Orpheus. He was and is the only writer in the world because every author is Orpheus. He was searching for love." Kathy Acker did not die alone. May she rest in peace.

Amy Scholder is an editor of literary and art books. She lives in New York City.