If you’re attending a bookstore reading, interviewing an author, or writing a book review, it’s a matter of tact and literary sophistication not to conflate the author with her fictional characters or the events of the novel with the events of the author’s life. A scene might draw closely on lived experience, but a reader can’t presume and the author doesn’t have to tell. The designation “fiction” offers a cover of privacy to any author who cares to make use of it. Most writers seem to, which is why it was startling to hear how the novelist and essayist Chris Kraus introduced her novel “I Love Dick,” at a talk at Scripps College, in Claremont, California, last February. “It all happened,” she said. “There would be no book if it hadn’t happened.”
In the novel, Chris, a thirty-nine-year-old experimental filmmaker who has followed her husband, Sylvère, a professor, to Southern California on sabbatical, develops a crush on one of his colleagues, Dick. Sylvère, finding that his wife’s infatuation has lifted her from a long depression, suggests that she write Dick a letter to tell him how she feels. She writes one, then dozens. Sylvère joins in, the couple passing the laptop between them, dropping references to “Madame Bovary” and the eighteenth-century French playwright Pierre Marivaux, and laughing hysterically. It’s a lark that seems to bring them closer together, until it becomes clear that Chris’s erotic obsession threatens their relationship.
“I Love Dick,” Kraus’s first book, was published in 1997 by the independent press Semiotext(e) and received little notice. Semiotext(e), founded in 1974 as a journal by Sylvère Lotringer, whom Kraus later married, was a shoestring operation that had a loyal following in the art world and some corners of academia for having introduced the French theorists Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Paul Virilio to American readers. “I Love Dick” sold fewer than a hundred copies a year until it was reissued, in 2006. Through word of mouth and the endorsement of some influential writers and critics, a new generation of readers has discovered the novel. In 2013, Sheila Heti wrote, in The Believer, that “I Love Dick” belongs to the category of novels that “tear down so many assumptions about what the form can handle.” Last year, Lena Dunham gave a copy to the singer-songwriter Lorde, who Instagrammed its distinctive white cover. It has sold about fourteen thousand copies so far this year. In August, the director Jill Soloway released a pilot for a television show based on the novel.
The narrator of “I Love Dick” has a flair for social satire, and presents the letters, which are quoted in full, and transcripts of conversations between Chris, Sylvère, and Dick as “exhibits” in a case study of how the unseemly experience called “falling in love” unfolds for one feminist creative-class striver and her unfortunate husband. Reading from the book at Scripps, Kraus, who is sixty-one, with a slender frame and a girlish manner, assumed a honeyed drawl that immediately had the audience laughing: “Dear Dick . . . When you called on Sunday night, I was writing a description of your face. I couldn’t talk, and hung up on the bottom end of the romantic equation with beating heart and sweaty palms. It’s incredible to feel this way. For 10 years my life’s been organized around avoiding this painful elemental state.”
Early reviewers concluded that the book was a fevered confessional memoir. A critic in Bookforum wrote that “I Love Dick” seemed “a book not so much written as secreted.” All the correspondence in “I Love Dick” was in fact written by Kraus and Lotringer under the circumstances described in the book. In the first fifty pages, Kraus spins Chris and Sylvère’s letter-writing campaign into an opéra bouffe. The couple dither and argue: Should they send the letters? Should they call him? Should they tape them to the outside of Dick’s house and make a conceptual-art video out of it? By the close of the first act, a love letter has been accidentally faxed to Dick’s office, and Sylvère has told Dick about Chris’s feelings in an excruciating phone conversation that he had the presence of mind to record in order to play it back for Chris.
In 1997, an article in New York cast the novel as a thinly veiled tell-all, saying that the character of Dick, who, like Chris and Sylvère, is given only a first name in the book, was based on the British cultural theorist Dick Hebdige, at the time the dean of the California Institute of the Arts. Hebdige told the reporter that “the book was like a bad review of my presence in the world,” and that it violated his privacy. From then on, Kraus acknowledged that Dick was based on Hebdige, and that their brief relationship fell along the lines described in the novel, in which Chris spends a night with Dick, who treats her with coldness the morning after.
That year, publishers’ lists were heavy on novels reckoning with American history (Don DeLillo’s “Underworld,” Toni Morrison’s “Paradise,” Philip Roth’s “American Pastoral”) and realistic short stories (Amy Hempel’s “Tumble Home,” Deborah Eisenberg’s “All Around Atlantis”). The rare instances of novelists writing about themselves or about the process of writing were high-concept metafictional comedies, like Mark Leyner’s “The Tetherballs of Bougainville.” Because “I Love Dick” was a story of erotic obsession, it was sometimes misleadingly associated with the so-called “transgressive sex” writing of the nineties, like that of Kathy Acker or Mary Gaitskill.
But Kraus’s books are neither technically experimental, like Acker’s, nor traditionally narrated, like Gaitskill’s. Her characters aren’t young or laconic—on the contrary, Chris is a nerdy, affable rambler whose letters to Dick range over such subjects as the paintings of R. B. Kitaj and labor strikes in Guatemala.
Kraus had in mind the model of French autofiction—novels that make playful use of the author’s identity without claiming to be autobiography. Some of Kraus’s influences weren’t literary at all. Chris writes in a letter to Dick, “At 3 am it dawned on me that Hannah Wilke is a model for everything I hope to do.” Wilke was an artist who in the seventies and eighties used herself in her own photographs and videos, including one video in which we hear an answering machine playing back actual messages from her friends and family. The last thing that Kraus wanted was to write what she has disdainfully called “a mainstream literary novel.”
But the mainstream literary novel now looks a lot like Kraus’s work. The longest novel of recent years runs to thousands of pages not because it has a large cast of characters or takes in the sweep of history but because it follows the daily life of one Norwegian writer very closely. The success of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle,” Ben Lerner’s “10:04,” Geoff Dyer’s “Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi,” and Sheila Heti’s “How Should a Person Be?” has helped “I Love Dick” find a new audience. Chris’s intimate, discursive voice, her range of literary and artistic references, and her mordant self-criticism have put “I Love Dick” within the central current of contemporary fiction.
“I Love Dick” ’s use of real names and documents helps dramatize a realization: the embarrassing circumstances of Chris’s life—her lack of success as a filmmaker, her financial dependence on her husband, her failure as a conventionally attractive object of desire, and her ridiculous crush—should be the substance of her art. As Chris’s letters get longer and more confident, her first-person voice eclipses the original narrator’s. She has learned to play both parts: the person caught up in her feelings and the ironist who sees them from above. She has become a writer.
I first met Kraus last February, at her white stuccoed, Spanish-style house in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles. Although her novels are set mostly in the East Village, upstate New York, and Europe, Kraus has written most of her six books—four novels and two essay collections—while living in California. She moved to L.A. in 1995, at forty, after spending her twenties and thirties trying to make it as an artist in New York, and found it more relaxed and socially fluid. For years, she taught writing classes at the ArtCenter College of Design, in Pasadena, and she currently teaches part time at the European Graduate School, a summer program in philosophy and critical theory based in the Swiss Alpine village of Saas-Fee. She is a co-editor at Semiotext(e), where she founded and continues to edit the fiction imprint Native Agents.
When Kraus was in her thirties, she and Lotringer invested money that his mother gave him in a cottage in the Hamptons, and Kraus discovered an interest in real estate. She has owned houses and apartment buildings in upstate New York, northern Minnesota, Southern California, and New Mexico, and makes about two-thirds of her income from rent. Kraus bought her Westlake house in 2000, but couldn’t afford to live in it until this past year. She and her partner of ten years, Philip Valdez, had moved into the house a day before my visit.
Kraus has been severely hearing-impaired since a car accident in 1997. When she gives a reading or a talk, she is animated and quick to laugh, but fielding questions afterward can be a wearying effort. We spoke in a wood-panelled den on the ground floor, which she and Valdez call the therapy room. Valdez, a psychologist and a program director at Exodus Recovery, a mental-health agency for the poor and homeless in Southern California, sees private clients in the den.
“I Love Dick” is the first volume of a trilogy, followed by “Aliens & Anorexia” (2000) and “Torpor” (2006), about a husband and wife whose marriage is coming undone. “When I got to the end of ‘I Love Dick,’ the obvious question was: What could possibly bring a married couple to the point that they would engage in such an enterprise?” Kraus said. Their names change from book to book, but their identities are the same: the husband a French professor who becomes a minor hero of the downtown scene, the wife an unsuccessful artist but an astute observer of art-world and academic vanities. “Aliens & Anorexia” is an account of the wife showing her film at a European film festival soon after the couple’s separation. “Torpor” goes back to a madcap trip to Eastern Europe in the early nineties, during which the wife entertains a half-baked plan to adopt a Romanian orphan. “Torpor” is the most accomplished of the three, a perfectly paced and surprisingly moving satire. But “I Love Dick” has an elusive magic. Chris is by turns a spirited heroine, a trollish underground woman, a feminist social critic, and a phenomenologist of romantic longing. The unresolved contradictions give Chris an extra jolt of life.
Surprisingly, “I Love Dick” has been taken up as what Kraus calls a “young-woman book.” When the novel was reissued, Kraus began to get invitations to give talks and readings at universities. “It was the graduate students who would invite me, or the assistant-professor types who would not be receiving their tenure,” she joked. Kraus found that she got asked as many self-help questions as literary questions. “People would talk to me about romantic triangles they were in and what they should do about them.”
For Kraus, the early-adulthood coming-of-age novel is an important perennial. Her own favorites range from Mary McCarthy’s “The Company She Keeps” to “Surveys,” a début novel, published last year by Natasha Stagg, that Kraus acquired and edited for Semiotext(e). Kraus notes that although Chris is a woman of forty, she’s having “experiences and crises that you usually live through in your late teens and early twenties.” These send her back to the desultory sex scenes of her actual twenties. In a letter to Dick, Chris recalls things that men said to her: “East 11th Street, in the bed with Gary Becker: ‘The trouble with you is, you’re such a shallow person.’ ” She goes on, “Second Avenue, the kitchen, Michael Wainwright: ‘Quite frankly, I deserve a better-looking, better-educated girlfriend.’ ”
When “I Love Dick” was first published, Kraus said, many readers mistook the novel’s self-mocking humor for the character’s, or the author’s, low self-esteem. “People remarked all the time, ‘She’s so self-hating, she has such a poor self-image.’ If a man makes fun of himself, it’s a joke. If a woman does, it’s a pathology and she needs therapy.” In an age of Lena Dunham and Amy Schumer, that doesn’t happen anymore.
Chris, though, is still one of few female comic losers in literature. Her catalogue of failures and disappointments is not confined to her romantic life. In “Aliens & Anorexia,” her husband wonders why “anyone with so little visual imagination” would ever want to be a filmmaker. In “Torpor,” the wife, Sylvie, asks the downtown photographer Nan Goldin to provide a blurb for one of her videos. Goldin agrees, mostly as a favor to Sylvie’s prominent husband, but then says that she didn’t understand the film. “Unhelpfully, Sylvie explained how she’d collapsed a 600 page Henry James novel and Bataille’s Blue of Noon into one twelve-minute movie. . . . ‘Oh, right,’ Nan had said. ‘I guess it’s not much of a narrative.’ ”
Kraus told me, “I just reread ‘Through a Scanner Darkly,’ and the Philip K. Dick character is always this kind of goofball loser. He’s a radio repairman. He’s a terrible husband. He’s a total schmuck. So why can there not be a female antihero?” Until recently, a comic female antihero was nearly inconceivable. There’s nothing funny about failing if you’ve been overwhelmingly obstructed by sexism and social conventions. If you want to make people laugh, you really have to fail on your own merits. The comedy of “I Love Dick” shows us an overlooked milestone. Somewhere between second-class status and full equality, there is a point at which women are expected to make their own way in the world, as men do. How can we tell that we’ve passed this milestone? It’s not by the presence of a few successful women like, say, Nan Goldin, but by the widespread feelings of inadequacy, envy, and anxiety that a success like Goldin’s inspires in her peers like Chris. This is existential freedom, and this is where the female antihero comes in.
Kraus was born in the Bronx in 1955. Her father, Oswald Kraus, worked as the head of a distribution center for Cambridge University Press. Kraus’s mother worked in various clerical jobs to help pay the bills. When Kraus was five and her sister, Carol, was two, the family moved to the blue-collar town of Milford, Connecticut, to shorten her father’s commute. The Krauses were antiwar liberals in a town of munitions-factory workers and supporters of the war in Vietnam. Kraus was teased and beaten by her peers. In junior high, she started skipping school and hitchhiking to New Haven to attend antiwar protests and hang around Yale.
In 1969, the Krauses applied for assisted passage to New Zealand, where the government had recently launched a relocation program to entice skilled immigrants. “My parents dreamed of a gentler kind of universally lower-middle-class society,” Kraus told me. “Medical bills would be covered, they would be in a less hostile environment, and any question of paying for college would also be resolved.” They were the first Americans accepted to the program, and flew to New Zealand at the end of the year, shortly before Kraus turned fifteen. Prime Minister John Marshall greeted them when they got off the plane at Wellington.
As a teen-ager, Kraus loved acting. She finished high school early and, at sixteen, entered the Victoria University of Wellington. She spent her spare time in the library, poring over the The Drama Review, an American journal of avant-garde theatre and performance art. In her second year, she won a scholarship that included a job writing for the Wellington Dominion, one of the city’s two main newspapers, and after graduation she worked as a features reporter and, later, a TV critic for the Evening Post. But she wanted to be an artist, and, in 1976, when she was twenty-one, Kraus moved to New York and settled in the East Village.
Her plan was to study acting while supporting herself with freelance writing, but she had trouble getting assignments, so she took a series of temporary jobs and started taking acting workshops with the avant-garde theatre pioneer Richard Schechner, the actress Ruth Maleczech, and the director Lee Breuer. She worked hard but was not among their most promising students.
Kraus’s East Village experiences bear little resemblance to those described by Patti Smith in “Just Kids” and Richard Hell in “I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp,” which tell of adventurous young people whose artistic risks are quickly rewarded. “The people writing the memoirs are artists who were very much visible in their twenties and early thirties,” Kraus notes, while her own New York story is about living in squalor without the success. “I was invisible. I was the person that I describe in ‘I Love Dick,’ this very shy, asexual woman, bad teeth, not a good haircut, not the right clothes. I would go to all these cultural events alone, badly dressed, feeling kind of weird because I didn’t really know anyone.”
Kraus met Lotringer in 1980, when she wrote and staged a performance piece called “Disparate Action/Desperate Action,” in which she gave a monologue “conflating ‘Middlemarch’ ’s Dorothea Brooke and the German left-wing terrorist Ulrike Meinhof.” Kraus wrote letters inviting “ten famous people” to see the play: “Susan Sontag, Richard Foreman—people I would have liked to meet but didn’t have a way to meet.” Kraus was a fan of Semiotext(e), so she invited Lotringer, and he came. They had a brief affair, then ran into each other three years later, at a poetry reading at the French Embassy, and started to see each other more regularly.
By then, Kraus was tired of menial jobs and bohemian poverty. “It was, like, either I have to go back to New Zealand or I have to go to law school. I can’t live this way anymore,” she said. “I was in my late twenties and I had no medical insurance. I was a total wreck, and something had to change.” Lotringer’s university salary and medical benefits helped support her. He also introduced her to the writers she read late at night: Julia Kristeva, Jean Baudrillard. “The whole world of French intellectual culture—I had inhaled it since I was a teen-ager.” Kraus discovered that Lotringer’s last serious girlfriend had been Kathy Acker, a glamorous downtown figure whose novels Kraus loved.
Maleczech eventually told Kraus that she would never be an actress. “She said, ‘You’re a director, you should make films.’ And I so worshipped Ruth, I was, like, ‘O.K., Ruth, I’ll make a film.’ A year and a half later, I made a film.” “In Order to Pass” is a half-hour “battle between words and pictures,” in which sunlight shines through trees; a woman talks about the work of D. H. Lawrence while two men arm wrestle; a group of people walk along a country road in silent footage. Sentences such as “Nostalgia implies the irrecoverable” flash along the bottom of a black screen, in the lime-green font of an early monochrome computer display.
During the next fifteen years, Kraus made eight more films, experimenting with different styles and themes. But it is only “Gravity & Grace” (1996) that suggests her signature preoccupations. In the course of a day, Gravity (played by Kristin Seth), a young sculptor from New Zealand who works in New York as a high-school English teacher, encounters a classroom of bored students, a preening East Village neighbor, and a New Museum curator (played by Kraus) who turns down Gravity’s work with a blizzard of critical-theory speak. In Gravity’s deadpan reactions to these foils, we suddenly see, in the last half hour of her last film, the elements of Kraus’s fiction.
At forty, Kraus found herself with a feature film that no one wanted to distribute and a growing stack of letters to a guy she once had a crush on. “At some point, I realized I wasn’t really just writing letters anymore,” she recalled. “It wasn’t until I had this bulging proof—these folders and folders of letters—that I thought, I have to do something with this, it has to go somewhere.” Kraus moved to L.A., rented a cabin near Joshua Tree National Park, and, in three weeks, wrote the third-person narration that holds the book together. “ ‘Dear Dick’ was a kind of crutch,” she told me. “Having a specific addressee solved a problem that had plagued me when I tried other first-person writing, which was ‘Who is the “I”?’ When you’re writing to someone, you’re not even thinking about that, it just rolls out.” Kraus brought to her novel much of what she had learned as an actress and a filmmaker. “How you talk is always predicated on whom you’re talking to and what you’re trying to achieve with that person.”
Lotringer and Kraus no longer lived together, but they continued to talk on the phone every day and to visit each other regularly. “We were still each other’s anchors. He was the first person to take ‘I Love Dick’ seriously and believe in it,” Kraus said. “The writing might have been addressed to Dick, but it came out of an extensive and ongoing two-decade-long conversation I’d been having with Sylvère.”
Shortly after “I Love Dick” was published, Kraus and Lotringer were interviewed by Ira Glass for his radio show, “This American Life.” The theme of the show was monogamy, and the couple read aloud from their letters to Dick, making no qualifications about the book’s being a work of fiction. “Nothing seemed unusual about it,” Kraus said. “I mean, who cares? The things that people consider private, they’re so common. My past is really so trite, it could be the past of the whole creative class of a certain era. There’s a great Gilles Deleuze quote on this subject: ‘Life is not personal.’ ”
Hebdige hadn’t seen it that way. In 1996, when he heard that Kraus was going to publish “I Love Dick,” he sent her a cease-and-desist letter. Kraus tried to mollify him. “I said, ‘Why don’t you write an introduction, and people will think we cooked up the whole joke together.’ ” Hebdige declined. Kraus had already changed the details of the character’s biography and appearance, and the titles of Hebdige’s books. “I changed everything short of the first name, which I needed for the title.” Hebdige stopped speaking about the book publicly after the New York story. In response to my request for an interview about his relationship with Kraus and Lotringer, Hebdige, who is now a professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara, wrote, “I really have no comment to offer either on them or the book.”
I asked Kraus if Hebdige’s objection to being depicted in the book seems any more understandable to her in retrospect. “It doesn’t,” she said. “I’m sorry, I’d like to say it does, but it doesn’t. I’ve been depicted in other people’s books. If you know writers, it’s going to happen.” To Kraus, the sketch of Dick is not an intimate portrait. “Dick was a smoke screen, he was the Wizard of Oz,” she said. I pointed out that there is a sex scene in the novel. “It’s true,” Kraus said. “But that scene is a generic one-night stand.”
After finishing “I Love Dick,” Kraus imagined a “triumphant return” to New York, where she planned to work on “Aliens & Anorexia.” She hoped that she would feel more confident, and become a peer to “the kind of people I looked up to.” And she harbored “wisps of dreams,” as she put it, that she and Lotringer would become a couple again. “I felt like I had finally become more employable, and we were in a position where he could help negotiate a spouse job for me,” she said. “My dream was that we’d go to some college town and start a new life together.” But Lotringer demurred. He suggested that Kraus stay at the summer cottage of a casual girlfriend in East Hampton. Kraus found herself alone in a cluttered house, pursuing a B.D.S.M. romance over the phone with a Hollywood film director on location in Namibia. The details made their way into “Aliens & Anorexia,” which began as a book-length essay about the artist Paul Thek and the philosopher Simone Weil. Kraus explained, “The tension and the anxiety and the humor of anticipating these calls from Namibia, and being in these extreme highs and lows, turned out to be complementary to my readings of the two thinkers.” One of the novel’s main themes is the experience of waiting.
“Torpor” is Kraus’s saddest book, and her funniest. It was written “in an atmosphere of loss” for her relationship with Lotringer. “We were still intellectual collaborators, but we were no longer each other’s anchors, and the writing was very hard,” she said. Rather than flattening the characters, “Torpor” ’s comedy deepens Kraus’s devastating evocation of the private disappointment and sorrow of a white middle-class couple. “The novel can have this intimate scope and feeling, but if you’re going to write about anything outside of a small personal orbit and take in the world, how could it not be satirical?”
Kraus met Valdez in 2006, when he applied for a job as a property manager at one of her buildings. Kraus’s most recent novel, “Summer of Hate” (2012), is about the courtship between characters based on the two of them. Like Lotringer, Valdez gave Kraus permission to create a character based on him. Paul Garcia is a former alcoholic who had been sentenced to three years in prison for check fraud. The novel focusses on what Kraus calls “the catastrophes of the poor.” In the climactic scene, Paul gets arrested again on an outstanding warrant for a hit-and-run injury, a warrant he didn’t know existed because he was homeless at the time it was served. “Before I was at the point of writing chapters,” Kraus said, she went over these details repeatedly with Valdez. She wasn’t trying to imitate Valdez’s voice so much as catch “whatever that transference is, between listening and writing. I was hearing the facts straight from Philip. I had what I knew of Philip. And then whatever I was writing was channelled through me. There’s always a remove.”
Kraus is currently taking a break from fiction to write a biography of Kathy Acker, who died in 1997, at the age of fifty. It’s a literary-critical biography, she says, with close readings of Acker’s fiction as well as an intimate account of her life. “I’m finding that I have to gather the research materials as if they were my diaries,” she said. “Her correspondence, notebooks, diaries—I have to absorb them to the point that I can write from them as if I were writing from my own material.”
Kraus had wanted to write about Acker soon after her death, but she found her early attempts “embarrassing—I couldn’t calibrate the distance properly.” Kraus’s books have little in common stylistically with Acker’s, but for a long time she felt the weight of Acker’s influence. Acker juxtaposed appropriated material from other novels and biographies with excerpts from her own diaries. “And those diaries were all about being this gutter rat in the East Village,” Kraus said. “It felt like my world that she was describing—all the sexual mores had never been written about so accurately, let alone from a female perspective.”
In 1993, she and Acker, along with other authors, had gone on a Semiotext(e) reading tour through Germany. In the novel “Inferno,” Eileen Myles wrote that during the tour Kraus “was entirely obsessed with her, wanting to be Kathy.” Kraus disputes the obsession but admits that when she wrote “I Love Dick” she found herself thinking of Acker’s novels, and that she was drawn to the idea of writing about an intimate world recognizable to its inhabitants. “Acker wrote kind of a chamber drama of the New York downtown scene, it was like Madame de La Fayette”—the seventeenth-century French novelist who wrote about court intrigues. “French court writing was an influence on Kathy, and Japanese court writing was a big influence on me when I was writing ‘I Love Dick’—‘The Confessions of Lady Nijo,’ Sei Shōnagon. All those texts were written for an insider audience. Everyone knew who each other was. And now, how many centuries later, we don’t know those people but we feel the intimacy and daringness of it.”
A few years ago, Kraus said, “I started to have more experiences professionally that were analogous to Kathy’s.” She began writing about Acker “through the distance, but with this incredible frisson of feeling that often I could write ‘I’ instead of ‘she.’ ” Kraus mentioned a line of Acker’s in “Blue Tape,” a video Acker made with Alan Sondheim about two days they spent having sex and talking about power struggles in sexual relationships. “She asks, ‘How close can I become to another person?’ ” Kraus said, paraphrasing. “Kathy always did it with sexuality, but in a way you can do it with writing, too.” ♦
