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Acker, then in her early teens, chose Virgil:Omnia vincit amor love conquers all.
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 McBrides book.
Its an exciting ride: critical, admiring, and fascinating if not totally revelatory.
A writers personal life is horrible and lonely.
Writers are queer so keep away from them.
From this, it may sound like Acker wanted to push people away.
But, in fact, she was consumed with trying to draw them in.
(You were always Kathys friend, says the author and critic Lynne Tillman.
She was never your friend.)
She never made it easy.
With suspicion or trust?
There are productive moments when McBride admits to not being sure what to believe.
But there are also times when he seems to crave unmediated closeness with his subject, a questionable goal.
Going through her clothes, McBride notes that it was forensically disappointing … Id hoped for some distinct smell.
All this anxiety about the boundaries of the genre seem fitting for a book about Acker.
She didnt have a single voice.
She constantly felt scattered, atomized, even schizophrenic, and shouldnt her writing reflect that?
Perhaps its Ackers sense of frenetic atomization that makesEat Your Minditself both compulsively readable and maddening.
At the same time, compiling something as straightforward as that could grate against Ackers own work and ideas.
Acker wasnt dealing with assertion or information, writes McBride, but in ambiguity, ambivalence, and emotion.
In a way, it didnt matter if her self-dramatization was factually true.
Eat Your Mindis best read alongside other Acker-inspired works that have come out in the last several years.
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