BONGI. You’re wrong—I’m not a
watcher; I’m a woman of action.

When he learned that she had shot Andy Warhol, Valerie’s publisher, Maurice Girodias, wondered in alarm if he had been wrong to take the SCUM Manifesto as an elaborate joke. “But it was a joke. It had to be!” he wrote. “She could not possibly have convinced herself that she was about to carry out the greatest genocide in the history of mankind single-handed!” This is the question everyone always asks about Valerie: How could she be serious?

Easily, I suppose. Jokes are always serious. At an academic event, I was once asked what I had meant by the term ethics as I’d used it in a publication. I hesitated and then I said, “I think I mean commitment to a bit.” The audience laughed, but I meant it; they laughed because I meant it. In stand-up comedy, a bit is a comic sequence or conceit, often involving a brief suspension of reality. To commit to a bit is to play it straight—that is, to take it seriously. A bit may be fantastical, but the seriousness required to commit to it is always real. This is the humorlessness that vegetates at the core of all humor. That’s what makes the bit funny: the fact that, for the comic, it isn’t.

Solanas was always known as “incredibly funny,” her biographer reports, noting that Valerie herself had commented on the uses of humor in the campus newspaper during her years at the University of Maryland, College Park. “Humor is not a body of logical statements which can be refuted or proved,” she wrote, “but is rather a quality which appeals to a sense of [the] ludicrous. Nor can humor, if it is truly good humor, be triumphed over by mere ‘massive education.’” Or, as a disgruntled reader put it in a letter to the editor, “It would appear that Miss Solanas establishes a point so she can stab something or someone with it.” This would become the first principle of the SCUM Manifesto: Valerie would make statements not because they were accurate or provable, but simply because she wanted to. Readers would be confronted by desire, not truth, peeking out of the text like a tattoo from a sleeve—a reminder of the flesh behind every idea.

Hence Valerie’s choice of the manifesto as her preferred form of expression. The paradox of the manifesto—and I’m convinced that Valerie knew this—is that its call to action is just that: a call, not an act, desire spilling over the lip of the text like too much liquid. It’s too serious to be taken seriously. More often than not, the manifesto is the refuge of the failed artist, the wannabe revolutionary—successful artists, after all, don’t talk about art; they make it. “SCUM is the work of the ultimate loser, of one beyond redemption, and as such its quality is visionary,” wrote the critic Vivian Gornick in her 1970 introduction to the manifesto. Impotence is always grandiose, and vice versa; this was as true of Valerie’s personal life as it was of her political fantasies. Her shooting of Andy Warhol capped off a period of intense paranoia regarding her publisher, whom she believed to be exploiting her; after she turned herself in to the police, she identified herself to reporters as a writer. “For Valerie, everything was her theories,” her sister, Judith, would later say. “Violence was just something that happened.”

Valerie has been arresting me with her desires for a long time. These days she lives in my head, like a chain-smoking superego: bossy, demanding, impossible to please, but always enjoying herself. I thought at first of writing this book, after Valerie, in the style of a manifesto—short, pointed theses, oracular, and outrageous. We share this, I think: a preference for indefensible claims, for following our ambivalence to the end, for screaming when we should talk and laughing when we should scream. But the last thing I’d want is to get in Valerie’s way. I don’t really want to tell anyone what to do; I want to be told. It’s no accident that Valerie can sound like a dominatrix in SCUM.

While I was finishing this book, a friend alerted me to the existence of a pornographic video in which a female teacher uses a quotation from the SCUM Manifesto to seduce two female students, turning them into lesbians. This made instant, perfect sense. It’s what Valerie did to me.