I Love Dick

But my favorite example of the genre is from nearly 20 years ago, and it’s by a woman. Chris Kraus’s ‘I Love Dick’ offers the story of a woman named Chris Kraus—also an experimental filmmaker, just like the author—reckoning with her unrequited love for ‘Dick ____,’ a cultural critic with whom she becomes obsessed. The narrative is an exploration of desire as something other than passivity or inadequacy (‘I think desire isn’t lack, it’s surplus energy—a claustrophobia inside your skin’) and relentless romantic pursuit not as self-degradation but a kind of generative, creative act.

The most important book about men and women written in the last century.

The intelligence and honesty and total originality of Chris Kraus make her work not just great but indispensable—especially now, when everything is so confusing, so full of despair. I read everything Chris Kraus writes; she softens despair with her brightness, and with incredible humor, too.

A little masterpiece of late twenieth century literature.

Devastatingly funny and sublime… a new classic.

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.

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

The biggest art revelation of the year.

Unexpectedly riveting.