In the same essay, Nelson called her “an inspiration, a provocation, a legend, a treasure, and a call to arms.”Ī call to arms against what, exactly? Against minimalism in the vein of Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, and the generations of writers who have idolized them, and against the ethos of restraint often preached in M.F.A. Kraus-whose press, Semiotext(e), has just published “ Bee Reaved,” a collection of Bellamy’s essays, many of which were written after the death of her husband, the poet Kevin Killian, in 2019-called Bellamy “one of the most important living American writers,” in a profile of Bellamy by Megan Milks. She is part of a lineage of frankly personal, formally experimental, and unapologetically sexual artists-mostly female, some queer-which includes the writers Eileen Myles, Chris Kraus, Kathy Acker, and Maggie Nelson and the visual artists Sarah Lucas, Ellen Cantor, and Jay DeFeo. Now seventy years old, she occupies the cult-icon sweet spot: worshipped in certain literary circles and virtually unknown beyond them.
One of her characters wonders if it’s true “that you can never trust anyone with a neat bedroom,” and Bellamy’s œuvre is the literary equivalent of a messy apartment: full of hard-ons, affairs, cat piss, genital infections, and vibrators drying on the dish rack.įor decades, Bellamy has burrowed a path through literary culture which has been simultaneously hugely influential and largely invisible. It’s a way of answering her own childhood question by insisting that art can go to the bathroom, which is really a way of saying that art can represent the parts of ourselves we feel most ashamed of. Throughout all my writing the shadow of dejecta looms.” Thrusting shit in our faces is part of Bellamy’s commitment to visceral honesty, wry abjection, and all forms of too-much-ness.
They don’t understand most of what I do, but this they get. . . . In Bellamy’s essays, we see her bending down to pick up cat turds, scanning the streets of her not yet fully gentrified San Francisco neighborhood for human excrement, writing at her desk next to a litter box: “One of the cats will sit in the box beside me, doing their business, and I feel like such an animal.
“I imagine existence as a boundless expanse of dirt and I’m a worm burrowing through it, gorging on it on one end, shitting it out on the other,” she writes. When Dodie Bellamy was a little girl, she used to ask, “Why doesn’t anybody go to the bathroom in the movies?” In Bellamy’s work, people definitely go to the bathroom.