Putting On Kathy Acker's Voice In Perfect, Agonizing 'Crudo'

Last year, the British critic and memoirist Olivia Laing wrote in a review of After Kathy Acker that Acker's punk novels, her body of work, were impossible to imitate. "Radical and uncanny," Laing wrote, "entirely inimitable, a smash and grab on the history of literature." The review came out in The Guardian last August, when Laing was in the middle of writing her exceptional first novel Crudo, a what-I-did-last-summer in Kathy Acker's voice.

Sort of. The character is nominally Kathy Acker, but her life is Olivia Laing's.is a memoir in drag. We get the outer trappings of Kathy Acker — her dead, dysfunctional mother; her breast cancer; her body of work — but starts in 2017, when Acker has been dead for twenty years, and the character's daily life and inner landscape are pure Laing.