Chris, Dick, & Me! – Emma Newman-Holden
April 9, 2026
For the longest time, I thought I Love Dick was a collection of prurient short stories written by a young gay guy that came out in the 2010’s. All I knew was the title, the author’s first name, and that the “cool kids” were reading it when I was fourteen. Anyway, I spent the first hundred pages of the book unlearning these very erroneous suppositions and didn’t find myself falling in love with Kraus until the two-hundreds…but boy did I hit the ground hard!—by that point, I think I came to fully accept that this was not going to be twink-penned erotica…and that that was perhaps for the best…
I enjoy Chris Kraus because she finds any excuse necessary to remind us of the main difference between female writers and male writers: the former will always be attached to themselves, and the latter are prone to being absolved of themselves. Men may escape the constraints of bias, and, in fact, it is this departure that makes the work of male writers so memorable. If a man’s life does happen to parallel his work, then it’s forgotten, coincidence, or necessary inspiration—if a woman’s life dares to parallel her work, then it is decidedly tragic.
I enjoy Chris Kraus because she is thoroughly annoyed by being a woman. She talks about it nonstop—the pitfalls, the poor aftertaste. She repeats the word “why” when voicing these grievances, even though she knows perfectly well “why,” so I’d really prefer if she used more declarative and schizophrenic language when dealing with something as chimerical as women. Sometimes I love being a woman so much that I can forget how drunkenly vile it actually is. There is a lack of sense and a lack of destination, and there is pleasure in knowing a man will never comprehend the garish, heightened senses that come with our breathed-in realities, that it’s just assigned for us, like a wish, or a letter bomb, and, of course, there is horror in, well, the rest of it.
Chris talks about how frustrating it can be to be a woman in academia, a woman in the arts (“a woman in academia… a woman in the arts”… barf, barf, barf, yet… here we are…) because there is no cognitive severance of the author and her pen on account of the public, and it is precisely this “seeing” (seeing…) of her that degrades her work so. Emotion must be personal, cyclical, remedial, instead of what it really is—literary.` A woman must be a jester, a whore, a victim instead of what she really is—an observer, a mechanic. Men preach there are no rules in art, but they’re forgetting the most important one: to misunderstand a woman’s discovery by any means necessary. And to be a woman of color among this cesspool of interruptions and mispronunciations, well, of course, the astigmatism only flourishes, race becomes an ailment in need of treatment, or worse, a commercial “advantage,” a prop!—but Kraus doesn’t usually trek this far.
I like this one part when she’s describing the paintings of American artist R. B. Kitaj. She praises Kitaj for extoling Pop art by subverting its standards, for squeezing both irony and reverence out of the obvious. And I think Chris is really great at this balance as well: she complains how an authoress’s work will never be afforded the impersonal, a complaint which she conveniently tucks into a (semi)autobiographical book about her sad schoolgirl crush. Oy vey (Kraus is Jewish)! Straining her meta-muscle, renting Kitaj as the clown car to pack her pathos, I much prefer this introspective to the rhetorical questions—I’ll always choose being talked about over talked to (must assume that Dick relates…).
His apathy and occasional mild frustration are hilarious. Chris wants adventure, Chris wants Henry and June, Chris wants blood vials and folie à deux, and Dick wants her to maybe stop calling so much. Some may be disturbed by Chris’s fervency, but Dick knows how to play the game… by denying any prior knowledge of a “game,” by eschewing presence and villifying intensity. For most of the book, I identify with Dick, much more than I do with Chris, and this makes me feel like a bad feminist, yes, but even worse: uninteresting. Anemic, secular, chaste, fair—God! How flat and undaunting must your interior life be when you’re identifying with the crush-ee rather than the crush-er? It’s no use, doctor! No one remembers the “healthy”!
I find myself falling victim to many of the assumptions that I chastise in this essay… I bet this is entirely true… she’s merely hiding behind the plush mask of autofiction… but even if I (we) knew this was all fact, I’d (we’d) probably just find new semantic avenues for degradation, convicting her of narcissism, of exploitation, in an attempt to “save” her from herself. I think, though, when all is said and done, Kraus craves this reaction like an itch. Making readers spend time ascertaining what’s true and what’s not is basically as effective as writing a whole sequel. The lascivious, burping mystery of it all… Who am I?… I’ll never tell… Or have I already?…. Oops! I’ve got your nose!… all you autofictionists are the same, I swear…present company implodes in mysterious mall fire before any inclusion may lay claim….
I wrote about wanting Chris to use schizophrenic language shortly before I got to the bit about her infatuation with schizophrenia. It seems she’s listening to my words before I can open my mouth (as the best schizophrenics do!). My favorite line in the entire book: “Schizophrenia’s a state that I’ve been drawn to like a faghag since age 16” (Kraus, 1997, p. 221). She has veneration for the form, but little interest in dabbling herself. I hypothesize why so; she doesn’t want to get her hands dirty, she strings along the myth of professionalism, intent on maintaining a subject-object relationship with her thoughts. It’s not like disorder is necessary, of course, life is not a Kathy Acker-drawn diagram, but why shouldn’t it be? I suppose Kraus’s digressions and references are her own version of literary disorder, and in some ways, even more transgressive since they’re not as easily identifiable, packageable (likeable?). Maybe I just can’t stand theory, I hate being talked to if one could dance it instead—which is why this piece shall never see the light of day… unless I’m bored, poor, or unkind, in which case, you brought it on yourself…
Kraus mentions these psychoanalysts, some of whom find schizophrenia primordial, some find it highly organized, maybe even modish—by and large, I’m unhappy with the comparisons Kraus makes or references: schizophrenia as capitalism, schizophrenia as academia, schizophrenia as therapy. I’m not exactly sure why I’m unhappy. Maybe because capitalism and academia and therapy are such dirty words. Schizophrenia is not dirty. There are some comparisons to the sexual and metaphysical, but not enough for my liking (is it so terrible to love beautiful things?). Kraus timestamps this theoretical talk with anecdotes about her Crohn’s disease flare-ups, full-body rashes, and two-for-one run of yeast infection and cystitis. This is around when I finally start to understand her feelings towards Dick.
What Chris does is so masterful, I truly feel sick writing this. The last fifty pages is a real high for me, the pages glow and boil. And something definitely happened, intestinally, nearly esophageally, when I first read Dick’s misspelling of Chris’s name in his letter—a denouement that makes Hamlet look like a Nancy Meyers movie! Jesus! How I ached and pleaded for a complete turn of character… for Dick to pen his own Here’s lookin’ at you, kid! Instead, all we get is antiseptic dribble shat from a Xerox machine. Did those thousands of missed calls mean nothing? Is that really it, Dick? After a hundred pages or so of “I,” Chris returns to the comforting blanket of third person, feigning detachment in a sea of “she”s. It’s almost as if she’s reminding the reader how her name is actually spelled, a child’s call for mother since her lover left. But, really, Chris ends the story walking alongside herself so she, too, can point and laugh at something. If only Dick could have seen her…If only once! Fair. Fair is for cruel men.
At its core, I Love Dick is an eisegesis of the fundamental misunderstanding of feminine expression… an elegy for the perception of feminine disconnect as chemical, or worse, medicinal!—you boys and your silly optimism! Women are woefully trapped on the inside and thus left finding enemies with the only person we’re allowed access to: ourselves! A treason of the highest order—no wonder we bleed with no wound! Schizophrenia is, above all, anthropological—feminist. Only chaos can validate Kraus’s experience with the public: to the average voyeur, Chris circumvents herself, her shadow becomes the puppeteer. They find her critiques more akin to masturbatory reflex, choosing to believe our subconscious over our conscious. Oh, Chris… to make something so personal and beg for objectivity—what is that? I find it rebellious, riotous, but men prefer ugly words like “diaristic.” Men may frolic among the panopticon, and women are resigned to the prisoner. Forget the cell!—How do we first rid the flesh?! Both man and woman have authority of sight—this is what men mean when they say the sexes are equal—but only one receives the decadence of withdrawal, too saint-like to be dubbed immunity, yet too soigné to be sanctified, and, so, I ask, as Chris so eloquently reheats: Why, Why, Why?
A perfect read and a perfect author if you need the reminder as to why— and a step-by-step of exactly how—you will never truly be seen (gender-exclusive).