I Love Dick by Chris Kraus review – a cult feminist classic makes its UK debut

This influential screwball tragedy set in the avant-garde art world is as fresh and passionate as ever

I first read I Love Dick a few years ago. What was it? I didn’t know exactly: some kind of cult book I’d heard of via whispers from the US, where it was published in 1997. Reader, I read it, and I still wasn’t sure. An autobiography, a piece of fiction, a series of essays, a work of critical theory?

It tells the story of Chris, a 39-year-old “failed” video artist, married to Sylvère, a cultural critic more than a decade her senior. When the couple visit Sylvère’s friend, Dick, Chris conceives an unrequited passion for him, and her husband colludes with her to play it out in love letters, which Sylvère reads, and sometimes co-writes, and which they mostly do not send. The letters proliferate into autobiographical confessions, essays on artists, rants against the position of women in the art world.

Continue reading...