After the Welfare State: Kathy Acker and the American Health Care System
Chris Kraus’s After Kathy Acker gives readers a long-awaited account of the experimental writer as a living, breathing, fucking, and frequently, sick human being. Masterful in detail, drawing on deep archival sources and interviews, Kraus’s account grounds Acker’s project in the physical environments of late-20th-century New York, California, and London. Consider, for example, the beautiful sentences Kraus uses to open the book’s main action:
New York City, 1971:
The bed, rarely made, floats in a room painted orange with big violet stars.
She spends most of her days and nights in the bed, sleeping and writing. Her hair is cut short. Twice, unable to do anything with it, she shaves it off.
The inside of the closet is violet, matching the stars. The room could be anywhere, really, although in actual fact it’s on the sixth floor of a building in Washington Heights, upper Manhattan, straddling the corner of Broadway and 163rd Street. There are gates on the two skinny windows, facing north onto 163rd. Even in 1971, the old prewar building, with its large corniced lobby, had seen better days.
Moving through the shabby, abject places where Acker lived and worked, adds to a growing literature that examines the lives of bohemian writers of 1970s and 1980s New York and the relationship of these writers with the impoverished around them. Like and in the previous century, and and in earlier decades, these writers developed sympathies for their neighbors that drew on their lived proximity to such poverty. Acker lived close to the bone in the 1970s, alongside segments of the population rapidly being labeled an unproductive “underclass” responsible for the country’s economic and moral woes. In the early 1970s, Washington Heights was holding on, but barely. It was just across the river from the scene of the city’s worst urban destitution, the South Bronx, and residents knew what was coming. By the 1980s, the neighborhood would be overrun with crime.
