Eat Your Mind

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.
 

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"[A] wholly unique, insightful look at Acker, whose work remains highly relevant today.”—Book Riot

"In this brisk, lively book, we learn that Acker was skeptical of autobiography yet drew repeatedly from her own life; felt liberated by the literary canon but also trapped by it; desperately needed people yet often pushed them away. McBride, who has thoroughly researched his subject’s life, doesn’t aim to resolve these contradictions, explaining that Acker ‘didn’t seek to be solved.'"—The New Yorker

"[S]mart and sympathetic"—The New York Times

“Critic McBride investigates novelist Kathy Acker’s fiery personality and artistic inspiration in this comprehensive biography…[H]e manages to bring together her diaries, novels, poems, plays, and letters with reminiscences from her friends, lovers, and collaborators for a full portrait of her life…The result is an excellent addition to American literary history.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Journalist McBride makes his book debut with a perceptive, thoroughly researched biography of the experimental writer Kathy Acker…Informed by Acker’s published works, private papers, and many interviews, McBride presents a persuasive case for her enduring significance as ‘an icon of unorthodoxy.’ A brisk, engaging literary biography.” —Kirkus Review

“[T]he real genius of Jason McBride’s Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker is his ability to use her life as a prism to sketch a cultural history, rather than a literary analysis, and provide adequate attention to underappreciated movements and artists who are arbiters of the current and future trends of literature. . ."—Forever Magazine

"Kathy Acker was a brilliant bundle of fascinating contradictions, and one of the brightest stars in a period when New York was the world center of creativity. Jason McBride has written a sympathetic, studious biography. He deserves every award for the depth of his research and the verve of his writing."—Edmund White, winner of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters

"At times hilarious, at other times a tear-jerker, Eat Your Mind elucidates Kathy Acker’s complex genius in all its outrageous, tender, brutal glory. Jason McBride has written a page-turner worthy of hyperbole. A tour de force!"—Dodie Bellamy, author of Bee Reaved

"A great and timely biography of Kathy Acker. Unafraid to celebrate the complex intellectual histories that form both outer skin and inner guts of Acker's work, her interweaving of ideology and aesthetics, her passionate conviction that the avant-garde was something to be lived as much as written, McBride has produced a study genuinely faithful to his brilliant, difficult subject."—Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder

"Writers' lives are seldom of much biographical interest, but Kathy Acker's had enough incident for a shelf of novels. She was as singular, passionate, and complex in her life as she was in her work, and Jason McBride accounts for it all with admirable thoroughness and equanimity, in lucid and dispassionate prose."—Lucy Sante, author of Low Life

"An elegant, engaging account of one of the twentieth century’s most important writer-bandits, which traces the twists and turns of her life with great empathy and sensitivity. Eat Your Mind is a feast, full of delicious anecdotes and tasty scraps of previously unpublished material, and a master class in writing the biography of a subject who is always trying to slip the net of narrative."—Lauren Elkin, author Flâneuse

“This book is going to be a barn-burner, the literary biography of the year.”—Jeet Heer, The Nation