CULT HERO/Tony Clayton-Lea: Kathy Acker died in 1997, a marginal post-punk, post-modern literary figure who never shied away from controversy.
Born in 1947 in New York, she was educated at Brandeis University, where she studied with philosopher Herbert Marcuse. She also studied poetry during the 1960s under Jerome Rothenburg before she turned to novel writing. In the introduction to her 1988 book, Young Lust, she wrote that she "came out of the poetry world of America". Specifically, she was taught by the second generation of the Black Mountain poets, but she soon discovered, like many before and after her, that writing poetry didn't necessarily pay the bills.
"Like both Rimbaud and Patti Smith," she once noted, "they [poets] are the white niggers of the world."
From the early 1970s, she published books within the US underground, taught in San Francisco, and gave many readings and performances. Come the 1980s, she came to the attention of a relatively mainstream European audience when Picador published Blood and Guts in High School. The book caused a sensation, incorporating autobiography, pornography and self-confessed plagiarism (which was to cause her problems in years to come, notably following a threat from Harold Robbins's publisher to sue for infringement of copyright over her use of a sex scene from one of his books). Often dealing with the relationship between power and language, she described violence and sexuality in graphic detail, and a major part of her impact - particularly in England - was the general astonishment that a woman could write so explicitly about sex.
Part of the reason for this amazement was her use of sexual sado-masochism in the narrative, utilised as a counterpoint to relationships of political oppression and deprivation. Known as the literary mother of the "New Narrative" movement (described as equal parts gossip, deviant sex and high-concept theory), her work was always located at the margins, her New York/San Fran extremism too much for a general readership to take.
She left London,where she had been based, for the US, continuing to write (poetry, novels, opera librettos, plays, journalism, rock lyrics), to teach (at San Francisco Art Institute, where she once asked a colleague to whip her in class) and to obsess about her body via the culture of the gym.
In 1996, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and shortly after had a double mastectomy. Refusing the follow-up treatment of radiation and chemotherapy, she instead chose nutritional and spiritual healing. It was in an alternative treatment centre in Mexico that she died, apparently lucid and in no pain.
"She just let go," a friend wrote, "which is just the way she wanted to make her exit."