Kathy Acker

Kathy Acker was an American experimental novelist, playwright, essayist, and postmodernist writer known for her idiosyncratic and transgressive writing that dealt with themes such as childhood trauma, sexuality, and rebellion. She was influenced by the Black Mountain School poets William S. Burroughs, David Antin, Carolee Schneeman, Eleanor Antin, French critical theory, mysticism, and pornography, as well as classic literature.

The only child of Donald and Claire (nee Weill) Lehman, Acker was born Karen Lehman in New York City in 1947. However, the Library of Congress gave her birth year as 1948, while the editors of Encyclopædia Britannica gave her birth year as April 18, 1948, New York, New York, U.S., and died November 30, 1997, in Tijuana, Mexico. Most obituaries, including The New York Times, cited her birth year as 1944.

Her family was from a wealthy, assimilated, German-Jewish background that was culturally but not religiously Jewish. Her paternal grandmother, Florence Weill, was an Austrian Jew who had inherited a small fortune from her husband's glove-making business. Acker's grandparents went into political exile from Alsace-Lorraine prior to World War I due to the rising nationalism of pre-Nazi Germany, moving to Paris and then to the United States. 

According to Acker, her grandparents were "first-generation French-German Jews" whose ancestors originally hailed from the Pale of Settlement. In an interview with the magazine Tattoo Jew, Acker stated that religious Judaism "means nothing to me. I don't run away from it, it just means nothing to me" and elaborated that her parents were "high-German Jews" who held cultural prejudices against Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews. ("I was trained to run away from Polish Jews.")

The pregnancy was unplanned; Donald Lehman abandoned the family before Karen's birth. Even into adulthood, her relationship with her domineering mother was fraught with hostility and anxiety because Acker felt unloved and unwanted. Her mother soon remarried Albert Alexander, whose surname Karen was given, although the writer later described her mother's union with Alexander as a passionless marriage to an ineffectual man. 

Karen (later Kathy) had a half-sister, Wendy, from her mother's second marriage, but the two women were never close and long estranged. By the time of Kathy's death, she had requested that her friends not contact Wendy, as some had suggested. Acker was raised in her mother and stepfather's home in the Sutton Place neighborhood of Manhattan's prosperous Upper East Side. In 1978, Claire Alexander, Karen's mother, committed suicide.

As an adult, Acker tried to track down her father but abandoned her search after discovering that her father had disappeared after killing a trespasser on his yacht and spending six months in a psychiatric asylum until the state excused him of murder charges.