She Was Wild Grass

For readers of Kate Zambreno, Maggie Nelson, and Nathalie Léger, She Was Wild Grass offers an unflinching exploration of art, history, and self-discovery.

The Beat Generation—the postwar literary revolution that canonized Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs—has long been mythologized as a story of male genius and rebellion. But behind those iconic names were women whose lives and ambitions were swallowed by the legend. When writer Katie Bennett stumbled across Joan Vollmer, the fascinating woman who shared her life with William S. Burroughs before he shot and killed her in 1951, she couldn't let her go.

In this groundbreaking hybrid memoir, Bennett braids her own artistic coming-of-age with Vollmer's haunting story—exploring what it costs a woman to reach for a creative life, and what gets lost when her story is told only through someone else's. Intimate and unflinching, She Was Wild Grass brings Vollmer out from the shadows while charting the risks and revelations of Bennett's own search for an artistic path.

"Katie Bennett’s search for Joan Vollmer is also a search for herself and her own place in the world. She Was Wild Grass is a powerful homage not just to Vollmer but to all those whose spirits and lives have been left out of the canon or otherwise neglected, excised. The book is candid and always compelling. I could not put it down."

—Chris Kraus, author of The Four Spent the Day Together

"Brilliant. . . I gulped this book down. It’s so dense with narrative, and it goes down like spring water. I couldn’t stop reading it. It’s terrifying and thrilling.”

—Sarah Manguso, author of Liars