"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."
"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."
"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."
Chris Kraus's 1997 autofiction I Love Dick chronicles Kraus's infatuation with a cultural theorist named Dick, a doomed one-sided love that pulls a depressed, 39-year-old failing filmmaker in a sexless marriage out of an artistic rut. The book had a slow start but became a cult classic and was adapted into a 2016 Amazon Prime Video series starring Kathryn Hahn as Kraus. Kraus experienced ambivalence about mainstream success, valuing literary recognition over a sitcom portrayal. She felt embarrassed supporting a book written twenty years earlier and vowed to write candidly about achieving success and the challenges of writing about middle age. Kraus is now 70 and lives part-time in Baja, Mexico.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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