Chris Kraus Reinvents the True-Crime Novel

On a recent Sunday morning, I took a bus to Williamsburg to meet Chris Kraus, the seventy-year-old writer who attained permanent literary It Girl status with her début novel, “I Love Dick.” The book, published in 1997, took the form of love letters written by Kraus and her then husband, the literary critic Sylvère Lotringer, and addressed to his colleague Dick, later revealed to be Dick Hebdige, a scholar known for his work on subcultures. After their first encounter, Kraus becomes obsessed with Dick—an irrational longing she can only articulate through missives about the C.I.A.’s interference in the Guatemalan freedom struggle, underappreciated feminist performance art from the nineteen-seventies, and madness.

“I Love Dick” did not fly off the shelves. But after it was republished in 2006, with a foreword by Eileen Myles, it was discovered by writers like Tavi Gevinson, Lena Dunham, and Sheila Heti, the latter describing it as a novel that changed her understanding of “what the form can handle.” In 2016, it was adapted into an HBO miniseries starring Kathryn Hahn and Kevin Bacon. Kraus suddenly found her work being pored over by a generation of women who recognized themselves in her mentally overstimulated and erotically deprived heroine. I was among them. For our interview, I wore a white hat that read “I Love Dick” in green letters on the front, matching the color scheme of the reissue’s cover, and “Chris Kraus” on the back. I had purchased it from the website Minor Canon, which put out hats emblazoned with the names of female writers (Zadie Smith, Elizabeth Hardwick, Elif Batuman). The site paused sales following online backlash; its male proprietor had not gotten permission first.

Kraus has lived in Los Angeles since 1995, but she was in New York to promote her new true-crime novel, “The Four Spent the Day Together,” which once again sees her remaking a genre in her own image. While Kraus was staying in northern Minnesota, in a mining region known as the Iron Range, news reports emerged of a grisly murder allegedly committed by three teen-agers. As she researched the killing, she was struck by the similarities between life on the Iron Range and in the working-class factory town in Connecticut where she had grown up. The book begins with a family not unlike Kraus’s leaving the Bronx for what they hope is a better life and ends with a man’s senseless death in a community ravaged by meth addiction. But most of the story is devoted to the deteriorating relationship between Catt Greene and Paul Garcia, a married couple based on Kraus and her second husband. In “The Four Spent the Day Together,” Paul, a recovering alcoholic, suffers a relapse which Kraus narrates in devastating, almost obscene detail.

The address in Williamsburg looked suspicious. The front door to the brownstone had been left ajar. I made my way up a narrow, derelict staircase and nervously knocked on what I hoped was the door of Jeanne Graff, a Swiss writer with whom Kraus was staying. Graff, a steely, serene brunette, answered, looked at my hat, and said, “You are here to see Chris.” Our conversation has been edited for clarity and concision.

I thought I would never have anywhere to wear this.

People gave that guy a hard time, but I didn’t mind.

Yes, he stopped selling them, but I D.M.’d him and he briefly reactivated the link so I could buy this.

Better to ask forgiveness than permission.

In your new book, you reference the viral phenomenon that “I Love Dick” became in the early twenty-tens. But you say that Catt—can I speak about you two interchangeably?

She’s my avatar.

O.K., so Catt feels that “the interest in the book had hardly anything to do with the book she thought she’d written.” What’s the book you thought you’d written?

I thought I was writing a book about second-wave feminism, women who were written off as mentally ill, artists who’d been written out of history, about activism and injustice in Central America, schizophrenia, and language. Instead, people read it like a self-help book. I felt like a motivational speaker. People would come to the events and ask me for relationship advice.

I read that you did an event for “I Love Dick” in London with the writer Joanna Walsh where you invited the audience to ask for personal advice, figuring that’s what they were there for anyway. Do you remember any of those specific questions?

They had to do with triads, often.

Because of the triangle between Sylvère, Dick, and Chris. How did you advise them?

I told them not to take anything I said seriously, and then I just weighed in with whatever seemed like common sense.

Everyone wants to know what you thought of the TV adaptation.

It was fun! I never expected it to be anything like the book. It’s not an adaptation if it’s too much like the original. I wasn’t involved in it creatively—I didn’t want to be. I visited the set. Joey Soloway allowed me to direct a little piece of a scene.

Which scene?

The one where the two girls are drunk and high, and they’re inviting some rock star to have sex with them as if they were the same person.

I should tell you, my ex was a grad student in Dick’s department.

I never heard from him again. You must know, because I’ve said it in other places, that I reached out to him before it was published and asked him if he’d like to write the introduction, so it would seem like we were all in on the joke together. He was horrified by that. I changed every identifying detail. His name only became public because a friend of one of Sylvère’s students, who wrote for New York magazine, wrote a story about the cease-and-desist letter he sent, and called him for a quote—and then, while he was trashing me, he let himself be quoted by his full name.