Chris Kraus, a writer who began her career in experimental film, is the author of I Love Dick, a novel based on her own life. Set in the mid-1990s, its principal characters are Chris Kraus, a 39 year-old experimental film-maker; Sylvère Lotringer, a 56-year-old French theorist (named after Kraus’s real-life former husband); and Dick ___, an English cultural critic with whom Chris is infatuated (the latter is based on Dick Hebdige, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara). Since its publication in the US in 1997, this work of “autofiction” has developed a cult following. A TV adaptation by Jill Soloway, the creator of Transparent, begins on Amazon next month, starring Kevin Bacon as Dick and Kathryn Hahn as Chris. Torpor, now published in the UK for the first time, is the third book in the trilogy that began with I Love Dick. Set in 1991, it’s about an experimental film-maker, Sylvie, and her French theorist husband, Jerome, who travel to Romania intending to adopt an orphan. Kraus lives in Los Angeles, where she is professor of writing at the European Graduate School.
Have you seen Jill Soloway’s adaptation of I Love Dick?
Yes. Of course, they’ve changed it. But one brilliant thing they’ve done is to tap into the phenomenon of the book, the way it now has a life of its own, people taking selfies with it, and so on. There’s an episode where the focus goes off the trio and on to the other women in the ensemble, and they all write their own letters to Dick, which was something some readers really did do, online.
What is the relationship of Torpor to I Love Dick?
People say I Love Dick is such a personal book, but I don’t agree. It’s a universal comedy. Who hasn’t had an affair? Who hasn’t had an infatuation? Even so, the serious question that goes unanswered in I Love Dick is: what could bring a married couple to collaborate on love letters to a third person? I knew it would take another book to answer that. With Torpor (2006), I got down to it, the narrative shifting from the first person to the third. Perversely, the material was too personal to write in the first person.
Are Chris in I Love Dick and Sylvie in Torpor the same person: you?
Of course they are! I’ve never had much talent for making things up. But Torpor is more concerned with historical trauma. It conflates Jerome’s past [the son of Jewish refugees who fled to France from Poland, his childhood, like Lotringer’s, marked by the Nazi occupation of Paris] and what he and Sylvie are witnessing as they stumble through eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The novel takes place at a particular historical moment, post-MTV, but pre-AOL: an interesting moment when the culture shifted from uni-channel to multi-channel.
You’ve made it sound grim. But it’s blackly funny, too, isn’t it?
I hope so. That’s another reason why I put it in the third person. I needed to treat these characters like little puppets. By externalising them, I got comic distance.
Why does Sylvie embark on her quest?
She’s 35, and desperately wants a baby. But the Jerome character is 57, and he already has a daughter. The last thing he wants is a baby, but he hopes to humour her. It’s ridiculous. The whole process [foreign nationals adopting Romanian orphans] has been outlawed by the time they arrive. It’s clearly not going to happen. Some part of her knows it isn’t. But they both need to continue to believe it is – and then they transfer everything on to their poor little dog. [She laughs.] With childless couples, it’s all about the dog.
Why is Sylvie so obsessed with property, with creating a perfect domestic realm?
When you can’t participate in one arena, the thing to do is to create another. The value she attaches to the domestic is compensatory. One model for Torpor was George Perec’s 1965 novel Things: A Story of the Sixties, a brilliant parody of consumerism. I got Sylvie and Jerome’s names from the couple in his book. They’re obsessed with English leather shoes and having a certain kind of blotter on the desk.
She is also, like you, a landlord.
Yes. I chose early on not to pursue full-time teaching, and property management has been a means of supporting myself. I still own the buildings I bought in Albuquerque in 2005, and I spend a couple of hours every day dealing with leaking roofs and plumbers and laminate floors.
The book is unusually straightforward about abortion. Sylvie has had three.
It’s shocking, isn’t it, that this would even be remarkable? It’s still considered to be a life-changing event for every woman, and that is clearly not the case. There are abortions that are no big deal, and there are abortions that are heartbreaking.
Don’t you ever worry about telling the world so much about yourself?
In the wake of the reception of I Love Dick, I felt I needed truthfully to explain its story. The only way I could do that was by being extremely specific [in Torpor]. But circumstances are never purely personal, they are… circumstantial. A novel is meant to show how large questions play out in individual lives.
What about your ex-husband? How does he feel about it?
Sylvère has always been supportive. Of course it’s uncomfortable to have your past exposed. But if it was only anguish and confession, that would be dirtier and more compromising, somehow. The comedy in Torpor acknowledges that these two could be anyone.
Dick Hebdige is said to be “appalled” by the way you used him in the book. Do you ever feel bad about that?
I never identified him, revealed his surname or the name of his books. So I don’t feel that I’ve done anything wrong. He identified himself in his zeal to denounce the book. I’m not sure why he was so appalled. Really, the whole thing was pretty benign and I would have been pleased to acknowledge him as a collaborator, if he’d wanted it.
Younger women have acclaimed you as a feminist writer. Is this how you see yourself?
I didn’t see myself as a feminist, capital “F”, when I was writing I Love Dick. I thought of myself as a gendered person – a woman – who was writing a book. Those issues of cultural presence, who gets to speak, are important to me. But class is as significant as gender in I Love Dick. Class is the secret undiscussed subject right now.
What’s it like being a cult figure?
It was never my goal. [She laughs.] But I’m not a purist. Purity is a very 20th-century thing. I’ve just finished writing a biography of [the writer] Kathy Acker. She desperately wanted to be a cult figure, and she achieved that. But it backfired; it came at the expense of her work. At this point, that’s something for me to think about.
• I Love Dick premieres on Amazon on 12 May. Torpor is published by Profile (£8.99). To order a copy of the latter for £7.64, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
• Chris Kraus is appearing at Sydney Writers’ festival and at the Wheeler Centre, Melbourne, in May 2017
