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While living in San Francisco, Kathy got tired of the sedentary writer's life. Truthfully, she wasn't always at ease in her body. In her work you can see that she was acutely wary of her femaleness. Sometimes she embraced it, and sometimes she ran like hell from it. She was quite happy when she discovered bodybuilding. It was easy to run into her at the now-closed Gold's Gym on Valencia Street. The gym itself, the machines and the process of pushing her body to new but controlled extremes fascinated her. So did the culture of the gym: The red-faced neo-Schwarzeneggers going into 'roid rages when someone stepped too close to them, or the alternating flirtatiousness and competitiveness of the female lifters. Kathy was never a big woman, but bodybuilding made her feel strong, like she didn't have to run from her own skin, like she could rewrite the meaning of a woman's body and make it her own. In 1996, Kathy was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a double mastectomy. She refused follow-up treatment -- radiation and chemotherapy -- opting instead to look for alternative methods, including nutritional and spiritual healing, acupuncture and homeopathy. It was hard for some of us, her friends, to understand why she wouldn't even try Western approaches to treatment. I talked with her about it a lot and came to understand her position: Neither Western medicine nor alternative medicines are objective, scientific constructs. At their core, they're belief systems. And Kathy had simply stopped believing in the traditional, Western approach. Kathy died in an alternative treatment center in Mexico at 1 a.m. on Sunday. When she went, there were no tubes in her body and no nervous interns standing by with crash carts and heart needles. She was lucid and without pain, and she just let go, which is just the way she wanted to make her exit. During her career, Kathy wrote poetry, novels, opera librettos, plays, journalism and rock lyrics. She even performed with bands such as Tribe 8 and the Mekons. Robert Mapplethorpe took her photo. She toured all over the U.S., Europe and Australia, reading her work to standing-room audiences. She taught literature and writing to a lot of rich kids who probably didn't deserve her, but like all writers, she had to pay the bills. She once asked me to whip her in class at the San Francisco Art Institute when she was trying to wake up her too-hip-to-live art school students, but word got out and a tremulous department dean advised her against such an extreme demonstration of the works of de Sade.
I suppose I should have written more about her work here, but it's Kathy's life I'm thinking about these days. Her work doesn't need my help to find a home, but let me at least tell you that if you haven't read "Blood & Guts in High School," "Empire of the Senseless," "In Memoriam to Identity," "My Mother: Demonology," "Hannibal Lecter, My Father" or "Pussy, King of the Pirates" (her last book, and all the critics who hated it can kiss my ass), go out and read some of them now. They're all available. Kathy worked with Grove Press for years and was one of the few writers I know who could say that nearly everything she'd written was still in print. She inspired me to go to a smaller press for my next novel. Being in print isn't immortality, but for a writer, it's the next best thing.
Richard Kadrey is the author of the novels "Metrophage" and "Kamikaze L'Amour" and the "Covert Culture Sourcebooks." He writes about technology and culture. PHOTO BY CARMEN QUESADA |
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