She Was Wild Grass

by Katie Bennett

A groundbreaking hybrid memoir, She Was Wild Grass deftly intertwines Bennett’s own artistic coming-of-age with the haunting story of Joan Vollmer, the remarkable yet overlooked figure of the Beat Generation whose life was tragically cut short when her husband, William S. Burroughs, shot her in 1951.

Braiding past and present, Bennett explores art, ambition, gender, and freedom, asking what it means to create in a world where women’s stories are so often silenced and forgotten. At once intimate and unflinching, it brings Vollmer out from the shadows of literary history while charting the risks and revelations of Bennett’s own search for an artistic path.

For readers of Kate Zambreno, Maggie Nelson, and Nathalie Léger, She Was Wild Grass offers an unflinching meditation on art, history, and self-discovery.

224 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 2026

Reviews

[Rachel]

Highly recommend this new book by Katie Bennett which dignifies the life and death of Joan Vollmer, the fascinating & flawed woman who was married to William Burroughs and was ultimately murdered by him. The book also dignifies Katie’s own story of becoming. It feels amazing to read women give other women, and themselves, their due. I ate this up in 2 days. Just stunning. And a debut!

Preorder link: https://www.brinkliterary.com/product...

[Katie Bennett]

I wrote it!

[Claire Askew]

Phenomenal. I love a genre-blurring lyric memoir in general and I loved this one specifically so much. It follows Katie Bennett's artistic coming-of-age/coming-to-power, balancing being an artist and being an adult woman in a world that so often ignores, overlooks, limits, and hurts women. Bennett's journey is braided with the life of Joan Vollmer, an important figure of the Beat movement who is better known for being married to and killed by William S. Burroughs than for anything else of her own life. 

I loved how devoted it was to the meandering, messy, bright trail between Bennett's own life and Vollmer's, and more broadly, the ways that the world tries to limit women's lives both as they are actually living them and in history. The male Beats' drug use and frantic lifestyle were signs of them really living, not letting society's strictures get in the way of the beating heart of life; Vollmer's and others' were evidence of their insanity, brokenness, poor parenting. A male artist with a family isn't remarkable; a woman today wanting to live for art and have a marriage, a baby, a house has to fight to "have it all." In some ways we've come so far since Vollmer's time, but there's still so much to struggle through to build the exact life you want. But it is possible! I loved the book's caesuras - it gives the reader room to breathe and reflect and let things settle, and the mosaic form feels true to complexity and true to the fact that all we ever have of other peoples' lives, and really our own, are bits and pieces. All we have to make capital-a Art are the pieces of day-to-day life and somehow the magic happens. Every Great Artist was just a person who ate and slept and had relationships and needed money and perhaps drank or used drugs and paid attention to their life in a way they could express. We are all just people! We can all make art! Just fantastic. Thank you Brink Books and my coworker Kevin for getting me a copy! 

[Hannah Bonner]

This book makes me want to recommit to being a writer again and again and again. Truly breathtaking.

[Page]

This books makes me want to keep going. It makes me feel happy for all the hard times and in love with strangers. It makes me feel proud of who I am. Written with such a singular voice. I just loved every piece of this.

[Charlie]

This bracing braided memoir—in the tradition of Kate Zambreno’s Heroines—tracks the author’s artistic evolution alongside her research into the fascinating yet tragic life of Joan Vollmer. Bennett attempts to excavate Vollmer from her scantily recorded history to reveal her as an influential artist of the Beat movement, for which her husband and murderer William Burroughs would be remembered. In this book, Bennett makes a compelling argument that the archivist’s duty is to dust off tired, surface-level assignations of creative influence and material output to reveal counterhistories that bear a much closer semblance to the truth. I found the straight memoiristic parts of the book somewhat lacking the guttural vulnerability Bennett sees and imagines into Vollmer’s life, but overall this is a promising feminist work from an artist-researcher who hails from Out of Academia. Amen to that.

[L]

Unique. Inspiring. Raw.