Editing Kathy Acker (section)

===Early life===
The only child of Donald and Claire (nee Weill) Lehman, Acker was born '''Karen Lehman''' in New York City in 1947,<ref name="kraus">{{cite magazine|url=https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/cancer-became-my-whole-brain-kathy-acker-final-year|title='Cancer Became My Whole Brain': Kathy Acker's Final Year |first=Chris |last=Kraus |date = August 11, 2017 |magazine = The New Yorker}}</ref><ref>{{citation |url=https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n20/jenny-turner/literary-friction |title=Literary Friction |first=Jenny |last=Turner |date=October 19, 2017 |pages= 9–14 |journal=London Review of Books | volume = 39 | issue = 20}}</ref> although the [[Library of Congress]] gives her birth year as 1948, while the editors of ''[[Encyclopædia Britannica]]'' gave her birth year as April 18, 1948, New York, New York, U.S. She died on November 30, 1997, in Tijuana, Mexico.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kathy-Acker|title=Kathy Acker {{!}} American author|website=Encyclopedia Britannica|language=en|access-date=2019-04-30}}</ref> Most obituaries, including ''[[The New York Times]]'', cited her birth year as 1944.<ref name="nytimesobit">{{cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1997/12/03/arts/kathy-acker-novelist-and-performance-artist-53.html|title=Kathy Acker, Novelist and Performance Artist, 53|date=December 3, 1997|newspaper=The New York Times|access-date=August 5, 2017}}</ref>

Her family was from a wealthy, assimilated [[History of the Jews in Germany|German-Jewish]] background that was [[Jewish culture|culturally]] but not [[Judaism|religiously]] Jewish. Her maternal grandmother, Florence Weill, was an [[History of the Jews in Austria|Austrian Jew]] who had inherited a small fortune from her husband's glove-making business.<ref>{{cite journal|url=https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n20/jenny-turner/literary-friction |title=Literary Friction |issue=20 |journal=London Review of Books |date=October 18, 2017 |volume=39 |access-date=2019-09-07|last1=Turner |first1=Jenny}}</ref> Acker's grandparents went into political exile from [[Alsace-Lorraine]] prior to World War I, due to the rising [[German nationalism|nationalism]] of pre-Nazi Germany, moving to Paris and then to the United States. According to Acker, her grandparents were "first generation French-German Jews" whose ancestors originally hailed from the [[Pale of Settlement]]. In an interview with the magazine ''Tattoo Jew'', Acker stated that religious Judaism "means nothing to me. I don't run away from it, it just means nothing to me" and elaborated that her parents were "high-German Jews" who held cultural prejudices against [[Yiddish language|Yiddish-speaking]] Eastern European Jews. ("I was trained to run away from Polish Jews.")<ref>{{cite book |last=Stratton |first=Jon |date=2008 |title=Jewish Identity in Western Pop Culture: The Holocaust and Trauma Through Modernity |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=mpfFAAAAQBAJ&q=Jewish+Identity+in+Western+Pop+Culture |location=New York City |publisher=Palgrave Macmillan |page=97 |isbn=978-1349372614}}</ref>

Acker was raised in her mother and stepfather's home in the [[York Avenue and Sutton Place|Sutton Place]] neighborhood of Manhattan's prosperous [[Upper East Side]]. Her father, Donald Lehman abandoned the family before Acker's birth. Her relationship with her domineering mother, even into adulthood, was fraught with hostility and anxiety because Acker felt unloved and unwanted. Her mother soon remarried, to Albert Alexander, whose surname Kathy, née Karen, was given, although the writer later described her mother's union with Alexander as a passionless marriage to an ineffectual man. Kathy had a half-sister, Wendy, by her mother's second marriage, but the two women were never close and long estranged. By the time of Acker's death, she had requested that her friends not contact Wendy, as some had suggested.<ref>{{cite book|last1=Kraus|first1=Chris|title=After Kathy Acker|date=2017|publisher=MIT Press|location=Cambridge|isbn=9781635900064|url=https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/after-kathy-acker|access-date=February 6, 2018}}</ref> In 1978, her mother Claire Alexander, committed suicide.<ref name="auto1">{{cite news|url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/31/after-kathy-acker-by-chris-kraus-review|title=After Kathy Acker by Chris Kraus review – sex, art and a life of myths|first=Olivia|last=Laing|date=August 31, 2017|work=theguardian.com}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.enotes.com/topics/kathy-acker|title=Kathy Acker: Critical Essays|website=eNotes.com}}</ref> As an adult, Acker tried to track down her father, but abandoned her search after she discovered that her father had disappeared after killing a trespasser on his yacht and spending six months in a [[psychiatric asylum]] until the state dismissed the murder charges.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.sfsu.edu/~newlit/narrativity/issue_one/acker.html |title=The Killers |publisher=San Francisco State University |access-date=2019-09-07 |archive-date=February 8, 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220208160513/https://www.sfsu.edu/~newlit/narrativity/issue_one/acker.html |url-status=dead }}</ref>