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Acker by Kraus is a tantalising prospect How do you go about writing a biography of an inveterate self-mythologiser, who made over fiction into life just as she made over life into fiction? How do you do it when her scene – the downtown New York artistic demi-monde of the 1970s and early 1980s – is already so exhaustively storied? And what position do you take as a biographer when your own name is indelibly yoked together with that of your subject?   Kraus herself, quoted in the blurb, prepares us for a certain kind of book: writing about Acker, she says, elicited in her ‘this incredible frisson of feeling that often I could write “I” instead of “she”’ We might expect, then, a matrilineal act of inhabitation, or of Acker-ish ventriloquism – the ‘collisions between I’s’ seen in the novels that Kraus notes as one of Acker’s most powerful experimental effects The story is told straighter than you expect, but there are touches of that here, moments of close-up exposition where it appears that the biographer has taken up residence inside her subject: ‘she realised that this outpouring might seem a bit strange, but she couldn’t stop’   Yet Kraus is generally strangely absent – written out, even We know they moved in the same incestuous circles, shared similar artistic preoccupations and both had significant relationships with the critical theorist Sylvère Lotringer, but Kraus appears in the first-person only once, attending an Acker reading at the Mudd Club in 1980 Fittingly, for this writer who never kept any of her correspondence, and whose ‘greatest strength and weakness… lies in the exclusion of all viewpoints except that of the narrator’, Acker often narrates herself Large chunks and small slivers of her novels and diaries are welded into the book, distinguished only by italics But here her correspondents are also allowed to talk back Kraus gathers and places uneasily side-by-side multiple, often contradictory, accounts from friends, peers and lovers   It begins after the end, following her death from breast cancer in 1997, as Acker’s friends scatter her ashes This, writes Kraus, is her ‘establishing shot’,