I Love Dick

In I Love Dick, published in 1997, Chris Kraus, author of Aliens & Anorexia, Torpor, and Video Green, boldly tore away the veil that separates fiction from reality and privacy from self-expression. It's no wonder that I Love Dick instantly elicited violent controversies and attracted a host of passionate admirers.

The story is gripping enough: in 1994 a married, failed independent filmmaker, turning forty, falls in love with a well-known theorist and endeavors to seduce him with the help of her husband. But when the theorist refuses to answer her letters, the husband and wife continue the correspondence for each other instead, imagining the fling the wife wishes to have with Dick. What follows is a breathless pursuit that takes the woman across America and away from her husband--and far beyond her original infatuation into a discovery of the transformative power of first person narrative.

I Love Dick is a manifesto for a new kind of feminist who isn't afraid to burn through her own narcissism in order to assume responsibility for herself and for all the injustice in world--and it's a book you won't put down until the author's final, heroic acts of self-revelation and transformation.

About the Author

Chris Kraus is a filmmaker and the author of I Love Dick and Aliens & Anorexia, and coeditor of Hatred of Capitalism: A Semiotext(e) Reader. Index called her "one of the most subversive voices in American fiction." Her work has been praised for its damning intelligence, vulnerability and dazzling speed.

Review

"Devastatingly funny and sublime. . . a new classic." -- The Seattle Stranger

"Tart, brazen and funny. . . a cautionary tale, I Love Dick raises disturbing but compelling questions about female social behavior, power, control." -- The Nation

"Ever since I read I Love Dick, I have revered it as one of the most explosive, revealing, lacerating, and unusual memoirs ever committed to the page . . . I Love Dick is never a comfortable read, and it is by turns exasperating, horrifying, and lurid, but it is never less than genuine, and often completely illuminating about the life of the mind." -- Rick Moody, Post Road