Paperback Edition
ISBN: 9781558618480
Publication Date: 04-22-2014

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Too drastic, too crazy, too "out there," too early, too late, too damaged, too much—Valerie Solanas has been dismissed but never forgotten. She has become, unwittingly, a figurehead for women's unexpressed rage, and stands at the center of many worlds. She inhabited Andy Warhol's Factory scene, circulated among feminists and the countercultural underground, charged men money for conversation, despised "daddy's girls," and outlined a vision for radical gender dystopia.

Known for shooting Andy Warhol in 1968 and for writing the polemical diatribe SCUM Manifesto, Solanas is one of the most famous women of her era. SCUM Manifesto—which predicted ATMs, test-tube babies, the Internet, and artificial insemination long before they existed—has sold more copies, and has been translated into more languages, than nearly all other feminist texts of its time.

Shockingly little work has interrogated Solanas's life. This book is the first biography about Solanas, including original interviews with family, friends (and enemies), and numerous living Warhol associates. It reveals surprising details about her life: the children nearly no one knew she had, her drive for control over her own writing and copyright, and her elusive personal and professional relationships.

Valerie Solanas addresses how this era changed the world and depicts an iconic figure whose life is at once tragic and remarkable.

“There’s no question that Solanas’s belief in the necessaity of theorizing “from the gutter” would have her denouncing today’s inclusive, increasingly professional landscape of feminism. But perhaps she can rest easier (if not in peace) knowing that Fahs has painted a sympathetic portrait of her uncompromising life that—for better and worse—wears its powerful ugliness on its sleeve.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

“Solanas was a revolutionary artist, and the more time passes, the more significant and prescient her revolution appears to have been, which is in many ways all she ever cared about. How magnificently powerful, to maintain humor, insight, and self-confidence in the face of so much violence. A biography of Valerie Solanas then, hell yeah. You should go read her manifesto and then you should go read this.” —The Brooklyn Rail

"Refreshing. . . . Fahs ably fills a notable gap in feminist history with this accessible volume." —Publishers Weekly

"Valerie Solanas is a biography of a compelling, charismatic, contemptible, and incorrigible woman. It is a biography of the effects of class in the United States on one woman’s life. It is also the biography of an artist. Fahs ends with Solanas’s own words from her 1977 corrected SCUM Manifesto: 'The true artist is every self-confident, healthy female; and in a female society, the only Art, the only Culture, will be conceited, kookie, funkie females grooving on each other, cracking each other up, while cracking open the universe.'"—Lambda Literary Review

“This is an astonishing book about an astonishing life. It is a stark epic of a woman who was a symbol in and of an era. Valerie Solanas tells us many of the brutal facts of Valerie’s existence, both before she exploded onto the scene in New York in the mid to late 1960s, as well as afterward. She was larger than life: a genuinely heroic figure. What I appreciate most about Fahs’s biography is that Valerie Solanas emerges with a dignity that escaped her in life.” —Ti-Grace Atkinson, author of Amazon Odyssey

“Breanne Fah’s book is a long overdue excavation of the obsessions, paranoia, and rage that fueled both Solanas’s visionary manifesto and her appalling attempt to murder Warhol.” —Cynthia Carr, author of Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnariowicz

“Breanne Fahs has written a compelling masterpiece sure to become a classic.” —Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of Outlaw Woman

“Valerie Solanas finally provides an in-depth, decade-spanning history of Valerie’s life, including mid-teen pregnancies, anti-essentialist college newspaper rebuttals, SCUM lectures, Up Your Ass casting calls, transience, letters of grammatical corrections to Majority Report, a continual emphasis from various sources on Valerie’s intelligence, radicalism, humor, comedic improve timing, and intensity, and thorough discussions of her work dismantling and repudiating sexuality, gender, morality, marriage, the money system, and the patriarchical status quo.” —Natt Ann Carrera, singer/musician