Fascinating, wide-ranging interview with the cult novelist.

This fascinating 1987 interview for the ICA's Writers in Conversation series sees the confrontational author of Blood and Guts in High School interviewed by Angela McRobbie, a literary and cultural critic and theorist with a long interest in gender and sexuality.
Acker begins and ends with a reading of her acerbic lampoon of Fear of Flying author Erica Jong (like Acker herself, a New York writer known for her provocative use of female sexuality).
Dressed in black leather, with her cropped orange hair, Acker is at first glance as spikey and rebellious as her writing. But she is fluent, open and polite throughout, and surprisingly easy to laugh.
With Acker speaking at breakneck speed, the interview covers a lot of ground. She runs through her colourful past, from her wealthy but troubled upbringing and eventual estrangement from her mother ("I was disowned, to put it mildly") to her youthful involvement in New York's poetry and avant-garde film scenes. With characteristic frankness she tells how her time working in a sex show "politicised me and threw content into my work without my thinking about it".
While she says she was alienated by the privilege of "the Warhol scene and the art scene" of the 60s, she speaks warmly of the late-Fascinating, wide-ranging interview with the cult novelist.alienated middle-class kids (though you could have said the same of many British punks).
She shows herself to be intensely intellectually curious (as well as simply intense), citing the influence of cultural theorists such as Sylvère Lotringer (though she chooses not to mention her relationship with him) and Deleuze & Guattari and of French feminists like Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, as well as acknowledging her debt to Jack Kerouac and, especially, the arch-experimentalist writer William Burroughs - a guru for US punk intellectuals.
Those familiar with Acker's work may not be surprised when she says that she's never read romantic fiction, and that she's drawn instead to weightlifting or motorbike magazines and 'a lot of pornography'. Although her work consistently explores sexual themes she says she rarely writes pornographically herself - but she admits that with her novel Kathy goes to Haiti, she was "trying to write a Nancy Drew porn book". But, she says, "it's taboo that fascinates me, not sexuality per se", and jokes that "if people are turned on by my work, I'm amazed!"