Chris Kraus, Female Antihero

If you’re attending a bookstore reading, interviewing an author, or writing a book review, it’s a matter of tact and literary sophistication not to conflate the author with her fictional characters or the events of the novel with the events of the author’s life. A scene might draw closely on lived experience, but a reader can’t presume and the author doesn’t have to tell. The designation “fiction” offers a cover of privacy to any author who cares to make use of it. Most writers seem to, which is why it was startling to hear how the novelist and essayist Chris Kraus introduced her novel “I Love Dick,” at a talk at Scripps College, in Claremont, California, last February. “It all happened,” she said. “There would be no book if it hadn’t happened.”