I Love Dick by Chris Kraus
This is a true story about real people and real relationships from a turbulent time when everything was still up in the air and uncertain when young girls believed they could become writers and filmmakers, and when big cities still had areas where creative types could live cheaply when everyone travelled the globe and lodged in each other’s apartments in London, Athens, New York, Sydney, and everywhere else, and when everything was still very much alive and well.
I Love Dick by Chris Kraus
Amazon.com
Chris Kraus, the author of Aliens & Anorexia, Torpor, and Video Green, tore the curtain separating fiction from reality and privacy in his 1997 book I Love Dick. It’s understandable why I Love Dick immediately sparked fierce conflicts and drew a large number of ardent fans. The plot is compelling enough: a married, unsuccessful independent filmmaker who is 40 years old in 1994 falls in love with a famous theoretician and tries to woo him with the aid of her husband. However, when the theoretician declines to react to her messages, the husband and wife instead carry on the correspondence for one another, envisioning the liaison the wife desires with Dick.
The woman embarks on a breathless quest that takes her across America, away from her husband, and far beyond her initial attraction into the realization of the transformational power of first-person narrative. You won’t want to put down I Love Dick until the author’s last, heroic acts of self-revelation and transformation. It is a manifesto for a new sort of feminist who isn’t scared to burn through her own narcissism in order to take responsibility for herself and for all the injustice in the world.
