From Publishers Weekly
Acker's ( Blood and Guts in High School ) 10th novel continues her well-established tradition of nontraditional prose: she borrows from both absurdism and metafiction, yet the final product is her own--a haunting and sometimes amusing fictional event. In a voice at once disturbing and wryly humorous, her narrator, Laure, recounts both dreams and real events to subtly weave together a dark autobiography. Laure's journey from the emotional and sexual abuses of childhood to the confusion of a girls' boarding school is fraught with psychological tortures, both created by and imposed upon her. Her attempt to overcome her parents' cruelty, her fetishization of various friends and lovers, and her eventual transformation into a weathered, motorcycle-riding bohemian are all told in vivid if surreal detail. Acker infuses often shocking social and political commentary that never detracts from her voice--everyone from the Marquis de Sade to H. Ross Perot fits right into the stew. Yet the book may leave some readers cold. Acker's constant graphic references to bodily functions and violent sexual acts are part of the experimental voice, but readers may feel as if the experiment--and the joke, as well--is on them. Despite inspired writing and astute observations, the novel ultimately fails to make us care. What emerges is a hallucinatory amalgam of emotion and desire, held together by a series of abstract events. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
"Memories do not obey the law of linear time," reads one of the many aphorisms in this novel, and it seems a key point of departure for Acker's unconventional exploration of memory and its manifestations in dreams. Here, a woman tries to come to terms with her vulnerability and with the excess mental baggage conferred by time. But that simple narrative is just one of the many important levels in the work, which also contains vast psychological wallpaper. Visceral, unflinching, wildly experimental with shifting contexts and settings, this is written in the "punk" style for which Acker ( In Memoriam to Identity , LJ 7/90) is well known. Forget categories, though. Her formidably talented hand gives the cacophonous materials compelling poetic rhythm and balance. Recommended for most collections.- Brian Geary, West Seneca, N.Y.Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Kirkus Reviews
The Marquis de Sade for mindless headbangers, Acker (Portrait of An Eye, etc.) here continues her endless stream of ranting about sex, politics, and the pain of childhood. Narrator Laure vents her anger and rage against repressive religions and her parents, who consider poor people inferior. She leaves home and begins her sexual adventures, which include lots of anonymous coupling, some random lesbianism, and casual S&M. Various characters defile religious objects with excrement, and there are also plenty of maggots and menstruation. At one point, the narrator seems to enter a boarding school straight out of Dario Argento's cult classic Suspiria, except that in this version a girl is found hanged by her tampon string. The trendy allusions proliferate: a hip mix of high and low cult. Lacan meets James Dean; Aerosmith kicks it up with Juan Goytisolo; and Radley Metzger is spliced with Luis Bu¤uel. Things turn into a bizarre version of Wuthering Heights, in which the narrator becomes Healthcliff, who becomes an animal. Further episodes find the (same?) narrator in a monastery of horny monks presided over by a head monk named Bush. If this political allegory is too difficult to follow, the next section launches into an explicit attack on ``President Bush'' and ``Mayor Koch.'' Ostensibly about love and desire, this humorless screed reveals a connoisseur's delight in body odors and functions. The author's sententiousness runs to such lines as: ``Moral ambiguity's the color of horror.'' Acker clearly likes to preach to the converted. Those who would be offended are unlikely to be attracted here. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


From the Inside Flap
Based loosely on the relationship between Colette Peignot and Georges Bataille, My Mother: Demonology is the powerful story of a woman's struggle with the contradictory impulses for love and solitude. At the dawn of her adult life, Laure becomes involved in a passionate and all-consuming love affair with her companion, B. But this ultimately leaves her dissatisfied, as she acknowledges her need to establish for herself an identity independent of her relationship with him. Yearning to discover who she is, to better understand herself, Laure embarks on a journey of self-discovery--a search that demands solitude and puts her at odds with the passion she feels for her lover, an odyssey that takes her into the territory of her past, into memories and fantasies of childhood, into wildness and witchcraft, into a world where the power of dreams, of perception, can transcend the legacies of the past and confront the dilemmas of the present. Unique among American novelists as the writer who consistently pushes at the frontiers of modern fiction, Kathy Acker makes advances into new and unexpected territory in each new work. With a poet's attention to the power of language and a keen sense of the dislocation that can occur when the narrative encompasses violence and pornography, as well as the traumas of childhood memory, Acker here takes another major step toward establishing her vision of a new literary aesthetic. By turns ferocious, subtle, searing, and passionate, My Mother: Demonology is a triumphant play of the imagination and a compelling testimony to the power of words to unsettle and to reveal hidden meaning. "Scarified sensibility, subversive intellect, and predatory wit make her a writer like not other I know."--The New York Times Book Review "What makes this book powerful is the archetypal punch behind each image, a punch that comes from an unknown assailant dressed in red wearing brass knuckles. Only Acker delivers it that way."--Los Angeles Times "Visceral, unflinching, wildly experimental.... Acker's formidably talented hand gives cacophonous materials compelling poetic rhythm and balance."--Library Journal "Acker's is a female voice that goes beyond feminism, artistic freedom turned into a free lifestyle."--The Village Voice "Acker discards, mangles, and rewrites literary conventions. Using words as weapons to smash her way into modernity, she pushes language to the tension point, explodes and reclaims it. What emerges is a new way of writing, ensuring Acker's place at the backbone of America's post-modern literature."--Kimberley Caviness, Boston Sunday Herald Kathy Acker's twelve novels include Great Expectations, Blood and Guts in High School, Don Quixote, Empire of the Senseless, Kathy Goes to Haiti, and My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini. She also wrote the screenplay for the film Variety and the libretto for the opera The Birth of the Poet (music by Peter Gordon), and is the author of the play Lulu Unchained. After several years in England, Acker has returned to the United States, where she was born and raised. She lives in San Francisco.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In her 10th novel, Acker's heroine, Laurie, is a woman helpless before the fury of her emotions. Love-obsessed, Laurie is plunged into a harrowing dilemma--sexuality and her feminism are the two poles that threaten to obliterate her inner poise, the false magic of her woman's identity.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Acker's ( Blood and Guts in High School ) 10th novel continues her well-established tradition of nontraditional prose: she borrows from both absurdism and metafiction, yet the final product is her own--a haunting and sometimes amusing fictional event. In a voice at once disturbing and wryly humorous, her narrator, Laure, recounts both dreams and real events to subtly weave together a dark autobiography. Laure's journey from the emotional and sexual abuses of childhood to the confusion of a girls' boarding school is fraught with psychological tortures, both created by and imposed upon her. Her attempt to overcome her parents' cruelty, her fetishization of various friends and lovers, and her eventual transformation into a weathered, motorcycle-riding bohemian are all told in vivid if surreal detail. Acker infuses often shocking social and political commentary that never detracts from her voice--everyone from the Marquis de Sade to H. Ross Perot fits right into the stew. Yet the book may leave some readers cold. Acker's constant graphic references to bodily functions and violent sexual acts are part of the experimental voice, but readers may feel as if the experiment--and the joke, as well--is on them. Despite inspired writing and astute observations, the novel ultimately fails to make us care. What emerges is a hallucinatory amalgam of emotion and desire, held together by a series of abstract events. (Aug.)

Library Journal