When in crisis mode, develop an irrational crush to pour your heart out via confessional, real-life emails. My emotional baggage handler of choice happened to be an older and wiser former colleague. As I sought solace for a myriad of modern life pressures – navigating the snakes and career ladders, to-ing and fro-ing with attempts at being an artist, searching for love’s young dream - my father was diagnosed with cancer.
Then I read I Love Dick. Chris Kraus uses her real-life story and romantic correspondence with an unrequited crush as the plot of the book, and ultimately as a source of wisdom. The “fictional memoir” plays out like a sketchbook of her life, a mind map of thoughts and feelings that morph into a personal philosophy.
Chris is a “failed video artist” on the cusp of her fourth decade and married to an older, more critically acclaimed artist Sylvère. It’s a sexless marriage, they’re affectionate but bored, in need of inspiration. Chris feels alienated by “shared platitudes about country houses, academic life, the advantages and disadvantages of commuting”.
“In 10 years, she’d erased herself,” she laments. She’s become an eternal “plus one” to her husband, spending her 20s “studying charm as a possible escape”. But she had been warned; as the iconic female artist Louise Bourgeois advised the young Kraus: “The only hope for you is marrying a critic or an academic. Otherwise you’ll starve.”
After briefly meeting at a dinner party, Kraus falls desperately in love with an acquaintance of Sylvère’s, a cultural critic called Dick. She colludes with her husband in her romantic pursuit of Dick via a series of love letters that start off as a kind of odd but harmless pet project to shake up their marriage. “Instead of wondering, ‘Would he like me?’ I wonder: ‘Is he game?’”
And so the game begins. Chris quickly comes to magnify Dick – whom she only meets a few times in the whole book – into a huge part of her life: “You are a county. A separate state. Visible, unbridgeable.” The sheer volume of letters, at times “globally embarrassing”, begin to form a body of work, grounds for a true art project beyond Chris and Sylvère’s initial plans.
We can all act out of character when in love, and here this plays out as a dark comedy. Chris tiptoes along a fine line between love, obsession and madness: “Are we like the famous burglar who enters peoples homes to steal small talismans – a pack of condoms, a cheese knife?”
By exploring her romantic obsessions and abjectly facing her own failures so unashamedly, Kraus redefines the stereotypical damsel in distress. She gave me hope by taking charge of her experience and how she is represented. By recording her emotions, thoughts and actions, she offers readers comfort, a sudden unity through shared experience. We’ve all done weird things in love, but we don’t always admit to them as frankly as Chris has. And I love how she owned her decisions and feelings in a creative way, rather than suppressing them in bottles of white wine a la Bridget Jones, or new shoes like Carrie Bradshaw. Read, and feel recognised.
