My Mother: Demonology

by Kathy Acker

Laure, a woman torn apart by the conflicts between her sexuality and her feminism, embarks on a journey of self-discovery that takes her back to her childhood

Genres: Fiction, Feminism, Literature, Queer, LGBT, Literary Fiction, Novels

Paperback

First published July 20, 1993

About the author

Born of German-Jewish stock, Kathy Acker was brought up by her mother and stepfather (her natural father left her mother before Kathy was born) in a prosperous district of NY. At 18, she left home and worked as a stripper. Her involvement in the sex industry helped to make her a hit on the NY art scene, and she was photographed by the newly fashionable Robert Mapplethorpe. Preferring to be known simply as 'Acker' (the name she took from her first husband Robert, and which she continued to use even after a short-lived second marriage to composer Peter Gordon), she moved to London in the mid-eighties and stayed in Britain for five years.

Acker's writing is as difficult to classify into any particular genre as she herself was. She writes fluidly, operating in the borderlands and junkyards of human experience. Her work is experimental, playful, and provocative, engagingly alienating, narratively non sequitur.

Reviews

[Lee Foust · Rating 5 out of 5]

This one just might be Acker's masterpiece. It all held together in its fragments just right, I think.

What thrills me about her work can only be considered as a series of genial paradoxes. Any single paragraph culled from any of Kathy Acker's novels is wholly unmistakably Acker--and yet they are all made up of things appropriated from other authors' works. Her novels are startlingly unique and unlike anything else you will ever read--yet they are wholly unoriginal works appropriated from various sources. Critics hate them--still they are terrific. Everyone is horrified by the pornographic elements and ignores the politics--yet the politics are deliciously subversive and tough and the pornographic scenes and dirty words liberating, silly, and benign. They have no real plot or characters yet they are engrossing, smart, funny, sexy, and so very, very importantly free--yet, again, they are always written to a certain formula of Acker's own devising and culled entirely from out of the subtexts of other books (and so cannot in any way be considered free). But they feel courageous and say things no one else dares to say--but, apparently, have already said or she would not have copied, culled, or drawn them out of those other books. In answer to those other books. In protest practically of what's in those other books. Even to destroy those and all other books with her own. Kathy Acker writes books that eventually do away with other books--as if their covers were made of sandpaper.

[Ellen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought I was ready for experimental as well as skirting the edges of porn in the interests of the revolution but I had a hard time with this book. Sometimes the (to me) shocking material worked in creating character, tension, and a complex portrayal of a woman struggling against (and sometimes collaborating with) exploitation. The woman veers between self-definition and just rebellion as well as engaging in sadomasochistic activities that I left me confused.

There are passages of absolute beauty and others that are intellectually intriguing. On the whole, the book seemed to me a puzzle I was only partly able to solve.

The intent of the book was not always clear, although perhaps that's just me. I was left both wanting to read more Acker and at the same time leery of so doing. Maybe that's the effect Acker was looking for. I'm not sure.

[Ellen]

This is a hard book for me to rate. Parts of the book are beautiful. There is a dream quality to it--as though you're actually dreaming along with the author. There's a section that riffs off Wuthering Heights that I loved.

But I found the somewhat--if not outright--pornographic scenes hard to take. Not exactly scenes but a motif throughout the entire book. I think this is meant to be disruptive in the way de Sade is disruptive (she mentions him) but then I never really liked de Sade either.

But parts are wonderful. So this book is kind of a 3.0-4.00 read for me. Fascinating but not lovely. My failing I think.

[Nathália · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a ride… I feel undoubtedly seen and brutally disoriented at the same time.

[Joey Shapiro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Blood and Guts In High School is still my absolute favorite by Kathy Acker, but this one feels like her most consistent I’ve read! Every novel by her is more or less a loosely strung together series of essays / reworkings of famous texts,, and this one has some real juicy ones: she rewrites Wuthering Heights, the horror movie Suspiria, Laure’s love letters to George Bataille, and a whoooole lot of other stuff. Very weird, very playful, always a rly truly exciting read!! Def one of her better ones

Also??? As someone w/ a passion for the color red this book absolute rules in its exploration of all the things that color means!!! Rock on Kathy

[Lore · Rating 4 out of 5]

hier moet ik toch even… over nadenken, denk ik (?)

[Elise · Rating 2 out of 5]

i honestly did not understand what was happening 90% of the time…some of the passages were well written and even thought provoking, but the majority of the book was kind of boring and didn’t make sense.

[Imane · Rating 2 out of 5]

I enjoyed the beginning and the last part, but the whole middle section was tough. This book mostly consists of dream sequences that left me confused. I really had to make myself finish it.

[Gianna Kelliher · Rating 1 out of 5]

enough of this.

[Maddie · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars rounded up for Goodreads

This novel reads like being immersed in a confusing dream. More on this later! Loved it!

[Bea Hruska · Rating 5 out of 5]

loved - a very different narrative style from the one i am used to from her but she has kept my favorite things. i loved her reinterpretations and retellings her. clit city forever.

[Sonni · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m not sure what I expected of this book, but probably not what it ended up being.
It was my first time reading something from Kathy Acker; this being said, I think one has to get used to her writing first.
It was as if I stumbled into something, losing orientation and scales and fixing points, following sentences but not a narration or plot (yet I also wouldn’t describe My Mother: Demonology as a fragment piece), after a while thinking I’d get the hang of it, understanding something (layers? links? symbols?), yet after finishing feeling just as confused as before. Like stepping into a whirlwind, a parallel world for these pages, where other rules apply than any known to me.
Obviously Acker writes of shocking things, blunt and unexpected; shameless, breaking seeming taboos. Tackling political and social issues as well of very personal ones; somehow I wished for something more, even more radical, more feminist (or maybe I just didn’t get it).
Surprisingly I enjoyed the last part of the book way more than the earlier “chapters”; I found some words or sentences that took me in and enchanted me (as in: opening up something new, a thinking process), yet I had hoped for more of these.
Overall happy that I read it, but will take some time until I’ll read a second book of hers.

[Elizabeth Finnegan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kathy Acker writes emotively and aggressively. A lot of people won't like her books simply because they do not like the language and crude renditions of sexuality. How else do you describe the feelings associated with child abuse, date rape and general misogyny so many have to face?

Her work is also deeply political. In this book written in 1993 she writes "There's no more education, no more culture - if culture depends on a commonly understood history - and perhaps no more middle class in the United States. There's War." Argue against that now the middle class is struggling to make ends meet, and open carry enthusiasts go to dinner at Chipotle wearing assault rifles.

[Cassandra Troyan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The illogical flows of this book get caught in that feeling of lingering illness, like a internal seduction continually reapproaching itself again and again. One day I woke up with some type of poisoning; food, alcohol, who knows. I was stuck in bed most the day and the possibilites of depraved fantasies became a rotten taste hidden in my skin, only avoided by endlessly eating.

[Autumn Christian · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of Kathy Acker's more abstract books, a multi-layered and dense dream about the conflicting desires for love and solitude. I will have to go back and read this a second time to see if I can catch more of its subtlety.

[Jeana]

::: pulled at random off the shelf because diana abu-jaber's books are NEVER THERE ... and any book with "mother" + "demonology" in the title MUST be read ...

... or not. waste of time.

[Zoe Hannay]

this was kind of a slog and i could not in good conscience recommend it to anyone brilliant cover tho

[marie]

seriously do not know how to rate this i loved it then i didn’t then i did i do not KNOW

[Avivit]

LOVED the beginning and the end, middle was a slog. reminds me of jelinek’s piano teacher and lispector’s apprenticeship in its explorations of the strange conflicting desires for freedom and imprisonment, submission and self-mastery, violence and pleasure in the process of learning love and embodiment

[Isabelle Clayton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ok this was really good and experimental and difficult and literally like nothing I’ve ever read before (except maybe Nightwood?). Super pornographic but strangely not taboo, anyways, maybe give it a read if you’re feeling bored of your feminism and interested in psychoanalysis and witches and dreamscapes.

[Tessa Erbe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I never had any idea where this was going like each sentence was genuinely a surprise and I think I loved it! A very unique experience

[Laura · Rating 1 out of 5]

I’m so sorry but I couldn't stand this. The problems began when I opened the first page. Admittedly this isn’t the book's fault. Unfortunately for Acker I unrelatedly had “Red” by Taylor Swift stuck in my head, and the first line of the book is “I’m in love with Red”. This made it so that every time the color Red is brought up (happens constantly) the clanging opening chords of that song would start playing in my head. This was not Acker’s fault, but this was NOT THE VIBE! AT ALL!!!

The coolest thing about this book is the Life of Pablo (rip) cover with a photo of a patch of sidewalk grass that looks like a bush. Really an incredible book cover. Hip hop alchemically creates something new by chopping up an existing song, putting your own spin on it and adding poetry. Acker is applying the same principles to literature. She takes a work that we are familiar with like Suspiria or Wuthering Heights or the Tale of Oiwa and then cuts it apart and collages it. It’s tempting to try and figure out the source for the other parts that you don’t recognize, but the other bits are probably from her diary at age 12 or a dream she had last Tuesday. And this brings me to my main problem with this book:

I DON’T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT DREAMS!!!!! It’s agonizingly dull listening to someone talk about their dreams. I don’t know how psychoanalysts do it because I’d jump out the window out of boredom. When someone starts describing their dream and it goes on for more than 2 sentences my eyes glaze over and I can’t absorb a word they’re saying.

Now laura how can you say this when you love the works of David Lynch and Leonora Carrington and many other artists whose work revolves around dream logic and surrealist imagery? I was trying to get to the bottom of this as well and I figured it out. It’s because I’m taking that shit literal. When I read a Leonora Carrington story it’s as real to me as my own dreams are. My OWN dreams are vivid and fascinating (to me), just as I know everyone’s dreams are to them, but I think it’s very very difficult to transmute that experience to others, and it’s a rare talent if you can make a dream interesting. When I watch a David Lynch movie it’s like I am having the dream, or tapping into a collective dream, which feels real, just like my own dreams feel.

But hearing about someone else's dreams, oh my god kill me! Let me be very clear: I do not in any way think I have special vivid dreams. My dreams are just as zany and mundane as anyone’s, and I don’t think anyone should be subjected to listening to me describe my dreams either. If I find a notes memo of a dream I have no recollection of, it’s completely meaningless and useless because literally anything can happen in a dream, who cares.

Anyway this book is exactly like having to listen to someone describe their boring ass dreams for hours and hours on end. This is a way to personally torture me. Also all of Acker’s dreams are like “My cunt… my vagina… my period blood… I’m George Bush’s daughter and he’s fucking my cunt….” I think this is a very of-its-times thing that doesn’t age well. I also shudder to imagine if she were still alive today the work she’d produce under a Trump presidency as a resistance lib. But I guess that’s unfair to her to say because I’m just extrapolating bc she was friends with Neil Gaiman so I’m imagining a cringy Amanda Palmer-type dealio and the fate that befalls many edgy artsy people from the 90s when they get old. Since she is not on earth anymore it’s not really fair to assume that she would age in such a way. A completely unfair criticism, as is the injection of Tswift, but nonetheless it had an effect on my reading.

It was difficult to determine exactly what was so difficult about reading this. A few months ago I read Nightwood by Djuna Barnes and I will be frank that it was one of the most difficult books I’ve ever read. I think the general problem with me is I don’t read enough poetry but that’s another matter. Still, with Nightwood while it was challenging I still felt like it was a deluge of beautiful language washing over me and I even listened to the audiobook after I read it physically just because I wanted to hear Dr. Matthew’s rants with my ears. The language in My Mother Demonology is very very simple, and yet it’s impossible for it to stick in my brain at all.

One of my life long frustrations with reading is that you can’t hold it with you forever the way you can with music. With music you can memorize lyrics and melodies so quickly and you’ll never forget them again. I wish every piece of knowledge could be held this way. However, this past month I went to A Midsummer Night’s Dream two times, and I also read Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession which had a paragraph at the end about the play which clarified some things for me on the purpose of reading/doing things even if you don’t remember everything. I can’t get too into this right now because I have more to say in the reviews for those two things, but suffice it to say that even if you can’t remember every single scene and sentence you’ll still be changed much like the characters at the end of the play are when they come out from under their spell.

With this book I would forget the sentences I read instantly, even though they were simple sentences, and not in a way that left me changed like the magic spell in aMNG, they just slid right out of my head. This felt like an eternal interminable book because even if I set it down for a split second to get a cup of tea when I’d pick it back up I’d have no clue what I had already read. So I’d just start at the beginning of the page. If I lost my bookmark then all hell broke loose because I’d do my best guess and honestly I think I reread huge portions of this book but had no idea. It was like trying to hold liquid in my hands.

I love to reread and I often read a book or sections of a book 2-3 times before I write a review (In my personal counting system, all times reading a book before a review is written counts as a single reading, even if it’s been a year and I have to get the book again to refresh my memory. Often I’ll read a graphic novel several times over, and I don’t count it as multiple books for my reading challenge because they’re all part of the same understanding. Reading a book again only counts as a new book when I’m a new man stepping in a new river, aka when I’m at a different life stage and have enough knowledge to have changed my perspective on the book, which makes it a totally new book/experience).

A better dreamlike book about period blood (even stigmata-bleeding-hole-as-bleeding-vagina) and your relationship with your mother is Before by Carmen Boullosa. That book is gorgeous and I still think about it all the time, although it largely takes place in “the days before sex” as Acker would say.

Some lines to give you an idea what reading My Mother Demonology is like:

“But I don’t kneed my mother’s suicide to know putrescent rot when I see it. I have this society.”

“As soon as the night turned as black as the cunts of witches, he walked through our door.” *4 sentences later describing Heathcliff's hair* “His hairs were blacker than a witch’s vagina”

“I know that you want me to die,” Bush said [HW Bush the president], “only so that you can mix my blood with your menstrual blood.”

“I’m going to hump you until I have no more pussy hairs.
Chance is the biggest bastard there is.
Meow.”
229

“After further journeying, I came to a countryside…I had to give my girlfriend back her muffin. When I searched for it, the only muffin I could find was a real or soft bran muffin hiding within a fake or stale muffin. It was all I had to give.
But before I presented her with this, I stuffed my period-stained underpants into my purse” 262

“Later I would meet girls who actually were as wild as I thought boys were. Girls carrying cunts who breathed, like those monstrous clams I found on ocean wastes, slime each time they opened, the way I know a heart will if it’s separated from the body, the vulnerability of openness” 183 Now this line I really liked. And I thought it was funny that there was a guy named Timofy.

It’s impossible to read or retain when you’re feeling an utter lack of interest. On paper this really seems like it would be my thing–I read a Bataille book a couple weeks ago and loved it. I like suspiria, I like Wuthering Heights, I like deranged explorations of sexuality. Perhaps I read this at the wrong time in my life. In a way I was thankful because I’m not historically a good sleeper, but armed with this on my bedside table I would fold within 20 words and sleep soundly through the night (rare for me). Sorry Ms. Acker but I was NOT FUCKIN W THE VISION. Truly nothing to hang on to. Unbearably tedious. Idgaf about dreams

This is the forgotten or nonexistent story, but I don’t understand it

[lia 🐩 · Rating 2 out of 5]

inconexo pero por complejo, no por mal hecho. la primera mitad me recordó a agua viva de clarice lispector: una entidad abstracta habla de la muerte y el deseo. aparecen cientos de referencias: diane di prima, cathy y heathcliff, bush, dario argento; dicen que la historia está loosely based en la relación de colette peignot y georges bataille. hacia la segunda mitad se vuelve más concreta: hay una narradora y una historia (y una motocicleta y una alemania y una rusia). estoy casi segura de que el cambio sucede cuando localiza su deseo en un objeto. es fantástico lo que dice sobre el deseo pero me cuesta mucho aún el incesto (veo que también de eso se trata blood & guts in high school, la novela más famosa de acker).

“the only thing that's possible between us is a car accident”

“you've destroyed every possibility of religion for me and i want you to help me”

“if you can’t be it, fuck it”

“the inside of the family is a maze whose entrances and exits are lost to those caught in its entrails”

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's the graphic stuff that calls the most attention to itself, but I mostly enjoyed the dream logic. Well, nightmare logic. Thinking about it now, it reminds me of David Lynch's recent films and Willam Burroughs' Naked Lunch. It was a difficult read, and I may not have finished.

[Patricia Pcr · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hard to rate. At some point, you get lost among the oniric images that Acker draws. However, the fact that it´s a very experimental style is something to keep in mind when you want to approach to this book. Those who didn´t enjoy Burrough´s "Naked Lunch" or the Dušan Makavejev´s film "Sweet movie" (somehow, Acker´s writing reminds me of that kind of movies) surely won´t like this book. But I absolutely recomend it to those who are willing to face something new, bizarre and crazy.

[Jakey · Rating 2 out of 5]

but I don't like Kathy Acker. Not even Pussy Queen of the pirates.

[kait · Rating 1 out of 5]

i forced myself to finish this because i’m not a quitter. i wish i had just been a quitter.

[Kai Joy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my first Kathy Acker which I think is v random/ funny I haven't read Blood and Guts in High School or anything. Anyway, going into it not knowing anything was a treat jbc (for any of you already familiar with Acker's work you know this), this shit bends u over and dominates u, forces u to submit to its logic. I think with any super experimental writing there are moments that don't connect esp bc this book vacillates between very serious, grave, shocking and then also very playful and even goofy. That being said, those moments of disconnect became fewer and farther between the more I immersed myself in the logic of the book (as I said earlier) and the highs of this thing are through the roof, past the sky and in fucking space. This book contains some of the most beautiful moments, some of the most shocking and striking images and some of the most intellectually intriguing ideas ever. I think many will be turned off by its crude, violent and shameless depiction of sex, sexuality and sexual violence, I also think that people who want books to have a straightforward linear plot for them to follow will not like this, but then again why would those people be reading Kathy Acker. Also fuck those people.

Ok so this book is loosely based on the relationship and correspondences between Bataille and Colette Peignot but a lot of it is a series of dream sequences within which the protagonist Laure (the name that Peignots work was posthumously published under) is processing and reconstructing her childhood in her quest for self discovery/ self annihilation. And ok in this book, Acker captures the circuitous and surreal logic of dreams, the FEELING of being in a dream, better than anything I've ever read (sorry Leonora Carrington, you come close tho). This alone was such a treat to be immersed in.

Then there is the Ackerification of Suspiria and Wuthering Heights, two sections that follow the plots of the movie and book respectively but with Acker's surreal edits, additions and distortions. These parts were so awesome and it made we so glad I've watched Suspiria and read Wuthering Heights so I could enjoy the sections on both levels (also just two pieces of media that I rly love on their own).

Maybe my favorite section was the one about the artist father needing to paint a portait of NYC but needing to "touch" true horror in order to do so. I won't spoil what he does but this section rly reminded me of the second part of Han Kang's The Vegetarian. Both are about artists who, due to their relationship to their work and to another person in their life, they must do the one thing that is truly forbidden or taboo in order to "create" the piece they are trying to create. This process by which the artist flirts with and then gives himself over the violent forbidden takes place in both books. I thought this section was just stunning (and ofc disturbing but that comes with the territory).

I also think that Kathy Acker (in this case through Laure) has an important political perspective and the way this book explores womanhood and sexuality feels so so complex and rich and necessarily shocking, uncomfortable and violent. Bc of this and bc of how much of this book is about the symbolism of dreams it feels v Freudian, v psychoanalytic and I think through that lens it is also v fascinating and successful.

Anyway 4.5 and I will def be reading more Acker, this was a ride. At first I was rolling my eyes but the deeper I got, the more I fell in love.

[B.J. Fantine · Rating 5 out of 5]

What is My Mother: Demonology except a master class in literary symbolism? There is quite literally nothing literal in this novel; truly surreal Surrealist Fiction. Let me be clear: Acker is not for everyone. This book is not for everyone. Most of the story (if you can even call it that) is told via the dreams of various characters, all of whom are simultaneously Acker yet not her at all, which can confuse the narrative point-of-view at times. Most of the dreams (if you can even call them that) are hyper-violent and very (very) sexually-charged.

And yet, it's incredible.

Everything in the novel is connected. Heathcliffe : Cathy :: B : Laure :: evil : demons :: sex : love :: violence : womanhood: these concepts and characters are ideas which exist in conjunction yet need - crave - to be independent. There is a breath to this linkage, reflected in the In... and Out... halves of the novel that imply a need to let go; to separate. How do you love without sex? Is it possible to be a woman and not fear abuse?

On that last point, Acker focuses a lot on femininity, menstruation, and what it means to be a mother throughout My Mother: Demonology. Although she says much on the topic, I believe the title captures her overall point on the subject spectacularly. With being a woman - being a mother - comes demons. Men, society, government (Bush at the time, but I think the same sentiment applies now) - all of it haunts; poltergeists that attach without ever playing Ouija. So, by the very nature of womanhood, one is forever cursed with demons.

On that premise, My Mother: Demonology poses (and answers/doesn't, depending on how you interpret it) a very simple question: how do you exorcise the demons that haunt you?

[Will · Rating 2 out of 5]

"The dormitory had been carved out of those grand rooms once polluted by aristocrats and rich people.

Beatrice had disappeared from my world.

I was in Prague. Caught among buildings that were dark: a square of buildings. The poet of those buildings, Pierre, and I, lovers for many years, were fucking on a tattered red carpet in a hotel. I had to find my hotel.

Pierre pointed to an old, as if marbled, red column that rose above the city, so far that I couldn't see its top. He explained to me that this is his family's home: the column runs through the sky horizontally over the whole city.

I ascertained that Pierre's parents are wealthy. I had never known this before.

Pierre left me.

The dark square of buildings, named 'The Dormitory,' in which I was standing lies in the upper right quadrant of the city. A long, narrow, black plank or street connected this square to its twin that occupied the city's upper left quarter. I had to reach the second square so that I wouldn't be murdered.

As I started walking the black plank, the sky above the black was yellow.

Now I was in the second square, standing in a hotel, which was Pierre's hotel. So it must belong to Pierre. Since I hadn't wanted to be in his hotel, I had to be lost.

I was lost in a foreign city, as I've been time and time again."