Close Writing

Alice Butler is Tutor (Research) in the School of Arts and Humanities at the Royal College of Art and co-editor of Gestures: A body of work.

• Acknowledgments viiPrologue. Beloved, So Bittersweet xiIntroduction. A Writer’s Love 11. The Diary Piece: The Line, The Cut, the Blur of Two Lives, or Kathy Acker’s Bad Sex Blur 412. The Novel-in-Pieces: “Like Little Birds Testing Their Wings,” or Cookie Mueller’s Adolescent Reverie 833. The Letter Piece: Around Valentine’s Day, 1980, or, Lovesick Perversions in Correspondence 139Postscript. Open Envelopes, or, I Am Still Stung 197Notes 205Bibliography 247Index 265

“Close Writing is a book as much about Kathy Acker and Cookie Mueller as it is about the process of writing towards them. This allows a self-reflexive, painfully close analysis of what it is to pursue the objects of one’s critical affection, fanaticism, or love. Alice Butler is an excellent, compelling, and challenging writer. There’s magic here, in the precision and clarity, and in the imaginative entrance into her subjects’ writings and lives.”—Dominic Johnson, Professor of Performance and Visual Culture, Queen Mary University of London“Close Writing is a unique feminist experiment in critical and creative art writing. Combining theoretical insights, deep archival research, and close visual as well as textual analysis, Butler enacts the intimate, performative practice of ‘close writing’ through the traces Acker and Mueller left behind—texts, garments, photographs. This book reimagines reading and writing as acts of affection, resistance, love and proximity across time, loss, love, and feminist desire.”—Jo Applin, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of the History of Art, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London