Chris Kraus regards the late success of her first book, I Love Dick, with ambivalence. A work of autofiction, first published in 1997, it chronicles Kraus’s infatuation with a cultural theorist named Dick, a doomed, one-sided love affair that nonetheless pulls Kraus, a depressed, 39-year-old failing film-maker languishing in a sexless marriage, out of her personal and artistic rut. After a slow start, the book became a cult classic and in 2016 it was made into an Amazon Prime Video TV series, with Kraus played by Kathryn Hahn. “To me, success would have been like a long review in the New York Review of Books, not being a character on a sitcom,” Kraus says now. Her commercial success was a financial boon, of course. “But who can stand by a book they wrote 20 years ago? It was massively embarrassing to go out and support the book as if I’d written it last year.”
She had, however, promised herself that if she ever achieved mainstream success she would write about it with the same candour that she brought to her struggles. “I’m going to write about all of it. Not just about youth, but about middle age,” she says. “Middle age is so much harder to write about, because youth is kind of like a trope. We’re very familiar with reading books about the aspirations or disappointed aspirations of youth, but middle age is much crazier ground. It’s not as sexy, it’s not as familiar. So, to write about middle age in the same way takes commitment.”
Kraus is now 70 years old, frank and sharp and funny as ever. She’s speaking by video call from her home in Baja, Mexico, where she stays when she wants to escape LA to write. Her onscreen name, confusingly, comes up as Agatha. “Oh, that’s my dog’s name. My account goes under my dog’s email address,” she says, very matter-of-factly. Agatha is a chihuahua-terrier mix and somewhere in the background. “Why does your dog have an email address?” I ask, when no further information is forthcoming. It’s for spam.
The Four Spent the Day Together, Kraus’s ninth book, is another exercise in radical disclosure, this time exploring how, as Kraus’s public profile soared in her 60s, her private life fell apart once more when her second husband relapsed into drug and alcohol addiction. She chose to write about being married to an addict because the experience is “underrepresented”, she says, perhaps because there is so much shame attached to it. “I think it’s maybe more shameful for the co-addict than it is for the addict,” she observes. But Kraus, who writes unflinchingly about shame and abjection, finds writing a way to metabolise those feelings. On the page, everything becomes “material”. “My character is just a character in the book. It’s never yourself – even if you use your own material. You’re never the same person, you’re constantly changing,” she says.
Kraus prefers the term “nonfiction novels” to “autofiction” because her books are as much about other people as they are about her, and she describes her approach as “reporting on experience”. “The fabulation of an entirely invented world of a novel is completely beyond me,” she says, “but transcribing and reporting to be accurate, that’s something I can do.” She changes names and details, but “I don’t invent anything. It’s more a matter of mixing, it’s a composition.” For decades, she has kept a detailed daily diary. “Just the act of writing anchors you in time and gives a reality to things that have happened that would otherwise be completely vaporous and elusive,” she says.
In her novels, Kraus uses herself as a case study, digging so deeply into her own, singular story that she uncovers truths that feel closer to universal, if not for everyone then at least for other “weird girls”. To construct them, she supplements diaries with boxes of photographs, interview recordings and – in the case of her latest book – court transcripts. The Four Spent the Day Together is split into three parts: the first describes Kraus’s upbringing in blue-collar small-town Connecticut; the second covers the slow, traumatic breakup of her second marriage; and the third describes Kraus’s journalistic investigation into a brutal murder that took place close to her former summer house in Minnesota, in a working-class community ravaged by meth.
In her more recent novels, Kraus has written about herself in the third person and used pen names, so that she can treat her characters “like clowns or puppets” and maintain enough emotional distance to write about very sensitive, personal topics. In this book, Kraus is Catt Greene and the character based on her second husband, a psychologist, is named Paul Garcia. Paul says awful things to Catt, telling her that she is old and ugly and that he only married her for her money, and she lives in fear of his rage. Late at night she Googles things like “is my partner abusive?”. The reader is desperate for Catt to leave the relationship well before she does so. “I’ve talked to other friends in this situation, who’ve been partners with addicts. And it really is like a frog in boiling water. You tend to rationalise it as not really the person, it’s the addict,” she says. She tried to find a therapist, but while there are countless therapists who specialise in supporting addicts, the only one she found who helped family members lived miles away, in Santa Barbara. She used to go to Al-Anon meetings often, but she struggled with their official position that it’s possible to carve out a healthy life for yourself while living with an addict. Ultimately, she did seek a divorce.
Kraus’s writing lays bare not only her private life, but that of others. The real-life Dick, identified by New York magazine as the British academic Dick Hebdige, tried to block publication of I Love Dick. How did her ex-husband respond to his unflattering portrayal? “The publisher wanted him to write an email giving his permission, and he did that happily and gladly,” she says. “The person who Paul Garcia is based on is now in a very strong and quality recovery … and we’re still very close to each other in many ways.” Is she saying they are back together again? Kraus laughs, sounding suddenly very girlish, and either embarrassed or appalled. “I mean, who knows,” she says. “If you’ve known someone for 20 years and they are part of your permanent family, those are such flexible and relative terms: together, apart,” she adds as she recovers her poise.
When it came to writing about her upbringing, Kraus held back until after her parents’ death, believing they would find it too painful. “Everything about our family was based on pretence, and pretence is the opposite, of course, of writing. I didn’t want to hurt them,” she says. Her father worked in the warehouses of the Cambridge University Press but would have everyone believe he was an editor. He was “a little bit Asperger’s”, she says, spoke with a fake British accent and had a fantasy that he was the illegitimate son of a famous Park Avenue surgeon. Her mother was “the enabler of these fantasies”.
Kraus was a good student, but was bullied mercilessly at school in Milford, Connecticut. By 13, she was regularly bunking off and hitchhiking to bars to drink with older guys. She might have gone completely off the rails had her parents not decided to emigrate to New Zealand in the hope their children might be happier. “They were timid people, and this was a very bold move. It was the boldest, most radical move they had made in their lives,” she says. New Zealand in 1969 felt like the end of the world, she recalls. “Magazines came by boat, and they didn’t arrive until three months after they had been published.”
The fresh start helped Kraus and her younger sister, who settled easily into school in Wellington. Her New Zealand high school was “much more interesting and challenging”, she says – you actually got to read whole books. “It wasn’t perfect, but there wasn’t the level of vicious bullying and scapegoating that there was in the US.” Why was the bullying worse in America? “I mean, it’s notorious!” she says. “Anyone who has gone through a year of high school is damaged for life!” Her first husband, the cultural critic Sylvère Lotringer, would tell her he preferred working with non-Americans “because he said there was something about the American upbringing that made people so defensive and competitive and distrustful”.
Kraus worked as a journalist in New Zealand before returning to the US in her early 20s, initially in the hope of becoming an actor. She met Lotringer in 1980, when he attended a performance piece she had written and performed in New York. They married in 1988. Lotringer founded the independent publishing house Semiotext(e), where Kraus remains an editor. Although it marked the beginning of the end of their marriage, Lotringer was initially supportive of Kraus’s infatuation with Dick, pleased that she had a distraction from her struggling film career, and he wrote several letters to Dick too. Semiotext(e) published I Love Dick, as well as Kraus’s later autofiction, Aliens and Anorexia (2000), Torpor (2006) and Summer of Hate (2012). Kraus is also the author of several essay collections and a biography of the novelist Kathy Acker, whom she deeply admired and who was an ex-girlfriend of Lotringer.
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In 2012, Kraus and her second husband bought a cabin together in rural Minnesota, where they planned to spend their summers. When, seven years later, three teenagers kidnapped another teen and shot him dead on a hiking trail near their home, Kraus drew on her journalistic background to investigate their lives. Before they killed the victim and used his meagre savings to buy junk food, the teens spent 36 hours hanging out together. What had driven them to commit such a brutal and seemingly senseless killing, she wondered? The working-class America they had grown up in – an ex-mining town torn apart by addiction, violence, family breakdown, poverty and lack of opportunity – was entirely different from the blue-collar community in which she had spent her early years, and geographically close but a world apart from Kraus’s rural bolthole. A local landlord told her that the teenagers’ thinking and worldview were “depraved” – “and I thought that was the most profound answer I got from anyone in the book, much more so than the educators, the police, the lawyers,” she says. “There’s just an inexplicable depravity at the heart of it that pretty much defines American contemporary society. It’s a nihilism and an apathy that swirls underneath everything.”
Meanwhile, she watches in horror as President Donald Trump succeeds in his “flood the zone” strategy, creating endless social media diversion to distract from his power grabs and excess. She is due to travel to Mexicali, in Baja California, to visit an exhibition by a Mexican friend who, although a green card holder, no longer dares travel to the US. “Why has the resistance to Trump been so ineffective?” I ask. The Trump administration is “so well-organised now, so relentless,” she says. “They are making incursions on every single front: the gerrymandering, the culture wars, the immigration roundups. To be in a position of resistance already takes so much more. It’s so much harder to defend than attack,” she adds. “That’s compounded by the fact that there’s no political party that has any glamour or allure to lead the resistance. The Democratic party could not be lamer or less sympathetic or appealing to anyone.” One person who has the right idea is Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, she continues. “He’s obviously less than a perfect avatar of the Democratic party. He’s a billionaire, he’s an enormously privileged person like Trump, but at least he gets it. You have to play the game you’re in and the game now in American politics is just cynicism, distraction and insult.”
Kraus is similarly politically outspoken in The Four Spent the Day Together, and she’s likely to annoy some on the left, too. She believes that the #MeToo movement overreached, for instance. “There’s so much competition within the attention economy that people push things to their absolute limits,” she says. In 2018, she wrote a controversial blogpost defending Avital Ronell, a New York University professor who was accused of sexually harassing a male grad student. She maintains that Ronell, whom she describes in the book as a “philosopher pixie”, was “completely villainised” in the New York Times piece that broke the story. “It was so clear to me that this was the next media pivot. #MeToo was already getting a little played out and stale and for a gay man to accuse a gay woman, that gave it another month of play,” she says. (The NYU investigation had found that Ronell sexually harassed the student and suspended her for an academic year.)
Around this time, she became subject to much Twitter mockery and insult for being a landlord, having for decades written and spoken openly about subsidising her artistic career by buying up and managing low-value rental properties. In her new book, she recounts since-deleted tweets by book critics calling her things like a “POS slumlord”. “I understand how people see landlordism as a kind of evil,” she says, because she recognises the frustrations of young people priced out of the property market, “but it’s a good and service like any other.” And unless you are independently wealthy, she points out, most artists need another source of income.
For years, Kraus has taught graduate art students at the ArtCenter in Pasadena, and she’s acutely aware of how much harder it is becoming for underrepresented artists to break through. Arts and humanities funding and scholarships that were established in the 20th century, when the economic climate demanded a global professional class, have mostly disappeared, she says, and “techno-capitalism doesn’t need that educated class any more, so it’s all shutting down”. Would someone with her background be able to make it today? “Put it this way, my students or former students who are merely the children of lawyers or architects or college professors feel that they are underprivileged, because they won’t necessarily have access to family money beyond college,” she says. In much of her work she has tried to probe unexplored aspects of the human experience, but this kind of storytelling will become harder. “There’s nothing wrong with privileged people making art – they’re great artists,” she says, “but it’s a single channel of experience that gets represented.”
