Becoming Kathy Acker: An Interview with Olivia Laing
Left: Olivia Laing. Right: Kathy Acker.
When Olivia Laing’s third book, The Lonely City, appeared in 2016, she was hailed as one of the leading contemporary nonfiction writers in the U.S. and the UK. After a breakup in her midthirties, she’d moved from London to New York. Adrift in a strange place and afraid of being alone for the rest of her life, she used her loneliness as a conduit to understanding the work of visual artists like David Wojnarowicz, Henry Darger, Zoe Leonard, the reality-media pioneer Josh Harris, and many others. Loneliness, for Laing, became a new means of perception, a secret channel. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Lonely City was named a best book of the year by various publications.
Laing never expected that her next work would be a novel. In fact, she was laboring over a new nonfiction book when Crudo erupted. Triggered by her readings of the American writer Kathy Acker, Crudo was composed over seven weeks. Writing in a bracing and racy picaresque style, Laing adopts the third-person character “Kathy” that Acker herself often uses. The result is a hilarious mash-up between Acker’s emotional realism and taste for transgression, and the events of Laing’s very twenty-first-century life as she vacations in Italy, updates social media, and plans her small wedding. The book begins breathlessly, with one of the best openings in recent memory. “Kathy, by which I mean I, was getting married,” Laing writes. “Kathy, by which I mean I, had just got off a
