Close Writing: Kathy Acker, Cookie Mueller, and Love-in-pieces is an interdisciplinary, creative-critical examination of two women writers associated with New York’s Downtown art scene of the 1970s and 1980s, Kathy Acker (1947–1997) and Cookie Mueller (1949–1989). Across theory and practice, the book contributes an original feminist methodology of epistolary writing and love (which it terms ‘close writing’) to revitalize and critically attend to the queer feminist politics of Acker and Mueller’s entangled lives, works, and autofictional archives (publications, images, performances, manuscripts, diaries, letters). Through this framework, the book draws on original archival research to contribute a dialogic ‘correspondence’ with Acker and Mueller’s own interdisciplinary ‘close writing’ of autobiographical disclosure and performance. The book argues that this work shifted the boundaries of sexual desire, the sick body, narratives of illness and love, as well as the line separating art and writing.