Through original, feminist methods of autotheory and creative-critical life writing, the article examines the gender and sexual politics of Kathy Acker’s performative self-image and embodied writings of illness and lovesickness. Attending to author-portraits and the illness narrative “The Gift of Disease” (1997), it argues for a reparative re-writing of her pathologised garments and medicalised body by newly foregrounding—via the feminist and queer scholarship of Apter, Sedgwick, and Ahmed—the perverse pleasures and political vitalities of self-fashioning during lived and aesthetic experiences of sickness. The article proposes in turn that Acker’s approach to clothing was intimately entangled with her performative life-writing combining purloined autobiographical materials (diaries, letters) and stolen canonical texts. In novels like Don Quixote (1986), Acker crafted what this article newly theorises as a feminist strategy of “kleptomaniac close writing”, wherein the conceptual practices of theft, collage, and cut-up letter-writing challenged aesthetic hierarchies and pathologising narratives to highlight the sensual and sexual complexities—its lovesick, autoerotic angles—of desire, embodiment, sickness, and writing.