Kraus is a novelist, essayist, performance artist, filmmaker, and coeditor of the publisher Semiotext(e), through which she has released a majority of her books. (Semiotext(e) was featured in the 2014 Whitney Biennial; Soloway’s partner is the poet Eileen Myles, who has appeared on Transparent, and whose work Kraus has published through Semiotext(e).)
I Love Dick, Kraus’s first and most famous book, is an epistolary novel comprising a series of letters written by a character—an artist, also named Chris Kraus—to a man named Dick, based on the cultural critic Dick Hebdige. The book deals with Chris’s attempted courtship of Dick and the disintegration of her marriage to a character named Sylvère Lotringer, which is also the name of Chris Kraus’s real ex-husband (and Semiotext(e)’s founder). Kraus once described the novel in an interview with me as “stand-up comedy.” Myles, for her part, called it “paradigm-shifting.”
The pilot, according to Deadline, is an adaptation of the novel written by playwright Sarah Gubbins.