Becoming Kathy Acker

Chris Kraus interviews Olivia Laing at The Paris Review:

Yes, it was incredibly liberating, both to invent the character and to help myself to the ravishing grab-bag of Acker’s own work. Crudo is probably the only book I’ve really enjoyed writing, because it was so fast and so free. It was such a relief to ditch the I, but to keep all the real details of the world, to collage it together rather than inventing it afresh. I definitely have a horror of making shit up, but I also have a horror of confessional writing. It’s like the case studies in I Love Dick, I do want to write about the personal (mine, Acker’s, David Wojnarowicz’s and so on), but for political reasons.

What do you think of autofiction as a term? It makes me feel a bit sick, but I don’t quite know why. I think it’s the idea that it’s some vogueish new style, rather than something writers have always done. Is Proust writing autofiction? Is Virginia Woolf? What do you think about it, and roman-a-clef? Is that what you see yourself as doing? And why anyway do people feel such an urge to pin things down in terms of genre?

more here.