I first came across Kathy Acker's work in 1984, when "Blood and Guts in High School", "My Life, My Death by Pier Paolo Pasolini" and "Great Expectations" were published in one Picador volume. I'd never read anything quite like it; appropriations from other writers' works (some of which I knew, some I didn't), dream maps, "Persian poems" (in what I now discover to be bad Farsi), drawings and doodles, sexual obsession and desperation (and not much satisfaction as far as I could tell), illness and the search for love. It was quite extraordinary.

Other work didn't quite hit the same mark; "Empire of The Senseless" had its moments (and at the time I didn't realise its debt to Gibson's "Neuromancer" ) so did "Pussy, King of The Pirates". "Kathy Goes To Haiti" was just pornography (but then, at the time, I didn't realise it was a specific attempt to write a porn novel) . But nothing quite replicated the shock of that first encounter

What we learn from Chris Kraus' sympathetic biography is that most of this is Acker's chaotic life, committed to paper and enhanced through what can only be described as literary sampling techniques, years before musical sampling became a possibility. And because of that, its quite possible to have exactly the opposite view of Acker's work; that its childish, repetitive, plagiaristic, pretentious and just a bit dull.

Or to think that Acker is all image and no substance; and the image was unique. Buzz cut hair, multiple piercings, tattoos long before they became obligatory, distressed leather and powerful motorcycles, all very different to her competitors (and she saw them as competitors) in the New York underground / avant-garde scene. But Kraus' does Acker the favour of treating the work, and the critical and structural theory underpinning it, seriously.

All the same, this is a biography, not a critical biography, and so its Acker the person who is brought to life. And for anyone who has read any of her work, the themes are familiar; an unhappy childhood, her mother's suicide, sexual precociousness and promiscuity, peripatetic wanderings, illness, the constant struggle for money and financial independence, working in a sex show and a stripper, the struggle to be taken seriously intellectually, and the constant search for love. But at the same time, she comes across as self obsessed, not particularly empathetic, and a perpetual adolescent, looking for attention.

Its an engaging, and ultimately sad tale and well worth reading for anyone who had any interest in Acker's worth. Minus half a star because Kraus seems to assume the reader will have an intimate knowledge of 80s and 90s avant-garde artists in New York, LA, San Diego, San Francisco and London (and personally, I don't) and much more importantly, Kraus does not reveal her prior involvement with Acker. Not only did Kraus later marry one of Acker's long term lovers, but she was part of the New York scene that Acker rejected and reviled and apparently was not well treated by Acker. This may not matter - as I say, its a sympathetic biography, but it something the reader should know. ( )

Kathy enrols on courses and moves from one home to another, one coast to another, and has sexual relationships with fellow artists and writers, mentors, friends and their friends. Krauss records it all in a fairly dry, chronological tone. Name-dropping is interesting if you know the names being dropped, but unfortunately I'm just not that cool, and there are lots and lots of names. Not so much a cast of characters as a roll call. There are discussions of the theories of Acker's self expression, but I don't get how they were realized. This book is very readable, but in a teasingly bland, having-read-without-penetration way. It seems less about Acker or any depth of her feelings and relationships - (for instance, what went wrong with her mother? She was clearly a very unhappy young woman as a teenager) and more about a large, overlapping, artistic clique and their competitive lifestyles. One woman in this book, whose lover moved over to Kathy and would have every reason to feel jealous, described her as so vulnerable that other women only wanted to mother her. There is no clarification of how this persona relates to the Kathy who wrote "Kathy goes to Haiti", in which she is sexually famished, never diets, and seems to have no personal insight about what is behind her continual quest for maximum pleasure with layabouts and a cad.

Kathy Acker (1944?-1997) was an avant-garde writer and celebrated member of the New York City art scene in the 1970s and 1980s. In this biography Acker comes across as a hypersexual woman who slept with many people, but was not intimate with any of them. The final chapter, in which Acker seeks a new-age miracle cure for her cancer in a sketchy Mexican clinic, is the best part of this book. The rest is for fans only. ( )