Chris Kraus’s boundary-breaking novel, “I Love Dick,” finds a new audience. Photograph by Whitney Hubbs for The New Yorker

If you’re attending a bookstore reading, interviewing an author, or writing a book review, it’s a matter of tact and literary sophistication not to conflate the author with her fictional characters or the events of the novel with the events of the author’s life. A scene might draw closely on lived experience, but a reader can’t presume and the author doesn’t have to tell. The designation “fiction” offers a cover of privacy to any author who cares to make use of it. Most writers seem to, which is why it was startling to hear how the novelist and essayist Chris Kraus introduced her novel “I Love Dick,” at a talk at Scripps College, in Claremont, California, last February. “It all happened,” she said. “There would be no book if it hadn’t happened.”

In the novel, Chris, a thirty-nine-year-old experimental filmmaker who has followed her husband, Sylvère, a professor, to Southern California on sabbatical, develops a crush on one of his colleagues, Dick. Sylvère, finding that his wife’s infatuation has lifted her from a long depression, suggests that she write Dick a letter to tell him how she feels. She writes one, then dozens. Sylvère joins in, the couple passing the laptop between them, dropping references to “Madame Bovary” and the eighteenth-century French playwright Pierre Marivaux, and laughing hysterically. It’s a lark that seems to bring them closer together, until it becomes clear that Chris’s erotic obsession threatens their relationship.

“I Love Dick,” Kraus’s first book, was published in 1997 by the independent press Semiotext(e) and received little notice. Semiotext(e), founded in 1974 as a journal by Sylvère Lotringer, whom Kraus later married, was a shoestring operation that had a loyal following in the art world and some corners of academia for having introduced the French theorists Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Paul Virilio to American readers. “I Love Dick” sold fewer than a hundred copies a year until it was reissued, in 2006. Through word of mouth and the endorsement of some influential writers and critics, a new generation of readers has discovered the novel. In 2013, Sheila Heti wrote, in The Believer, that “I Love Dick” belongs to the category of novels that “tear down so many assumptions about what the form can handle.” Last year, Lena Dunham gave a copy to the singer-songwriter Lorde, who Instagrammed its distinctive white cover. It has sold about fourteen thousand copies so far this year. In August, the director Jill Soloway released a pilot for a television show based on the novel.

The narrator of “I Love Dick” has a flair for social satire, and presents the letters, which are quoted in full, and transcripts of conversations between Chris, Sylvère, and Dick as “exhibits” in a case study of how the unseemly experience called “falling in love” unfolds for one feminist creative-class striver and her unfortunate husband. Reading from the book at Scripps, Kraus, who is sixty-one, with a slender frame and a girlish manner, assumed a honeyed drawl that immediately had the audience laughing: “Dear Dick . . . When you called on Sunday night, I was writing a description of your face. I couldn’t talk, and hung up on the bottom end of the romantic equation with beating heart and sweaty palms. It’s incredible to feel this way. For 10 years my life’s been organized around avoiding this painful elemental state.”

Early reviewers concluded that the book was a fevered confessional memoir. A critic in Bookforum wrote that “I Love Dick” seemed “a book not so much written as secreted.” All the correspondence in “I Love Dick” was in fact written by Kraus and Lotringer under the circumstances described in the book. In the first fifty pages, Kraus spins Chris and Sylvère’s letter-writing campaign into an opéra bouffe. The couple dither and argue: Should they send the letters? Should they call him? Should they tape them to the outside of Dick’s house and make a conceptual-art video out of it? By the close of the first act, a love letter has been accidentally faxed to Dick’s office, and Sylvère has told Dick about Chris’s feelings in an excruciating phone conversation that he had the presence of mind to record in order to play it back for Chris.

In 1997, an article in New York cast the novel as a thinly veiled tell-all, saying that the character of Dick, who, like Chris and Sylvère, is given only a first name in the book, was based on the British cultural theorist Dick Hebdige, at the time the dean of the California Institute of the Arts. Hebdige told the reporter that “the book was like a bad review of my presence in the world,” and that it violated his privacy. From then on, Kraus acknowledged that Dick was based on Hebdige, and that their brief relationship fell along the lines described in the novel, in which Chris spends a night with Dick, who treats her with coldness the morning after.

That year, publishers’ lists were heavy on novels reckoning with American history (Don DeLillo’s “Underworld,” Toni Morrison’s “Paradise,” Philip Roth’s “American Pastoral”) and realistic short stories (Amy Hempel’s “Tumble Home,” Deborah Eisenberg’s “All Around Atlantis”). The rare instances of novelists writing about themselves or about the process of writing were high-concept metafictional comedies, like Mark Leyner’s “The Tetherballs of Bougainville.” Because “I Love Dick” was a story of erotic obsession, it was sometimes misleadingly associated with the so-called “transgressive sex” writing of the nineties, like that of Kathy Acker or Mary Gaitskill.

But Kraus’s books are neither technically experimental, like Acker’s, nor traditionally narrated, like Gaitskill’s. Her characters aren’t young or laconic—on the contrary, Chris is a nerdy, affable rambler whose letters to Dick range over such subjects as the paintings of R. B. Kitaj and labor strikes in Guatemala.

Kraus had in mind the model of French autofiction—novels that make playful use of the author’s identity without claiming to be autobiography. Some of Kraus’s influences weren’t literary at all. Chris writes in a letter to Dick, “At 3 am it dawned on me that Hannah Wilke is a model for everything I hope to do.” Wilke was an artist who in the seventies and eighties used herself in her own photographs and videos, including one video in which we hear an answering machine playing back actual messages from her friends and family. The last thing that Kraus wanted was to write what she has disdainfully called “a mainstream literary novel.”

But the mainstream literary novel now looks a lot like Kraus’s work. The longest novel of recent years runs to thousands of pages not because it has a large cast of characters or takes in the sweep of history but because it follows the daily life of one Norwegian writer very closely. The success of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle,” Ben Lerner’s “10:04,” Geoff Dyer’s “Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi,” and Sheila Heti’s “How Should a Person Be?” has helped “I Love Dick” find a new audience. Chris’s intimate, discursive voice, her range of literary and artistic references, and her mordant self-criticism have put “I Love Dick” within the central current of contemporary fiction.

“I Love Dick” ’s use of real names and documents helps dramatize a realization: the embarrassing circumstances of Chris’s life—her lack of success as a filmmaker, her financial dependence on her husband, her failure as a conventionally attractive object of desire, and her ridiculous crush—should be the substance of her art. As Chris’s letters get longer and more confident, her first-person voice eclipses the original narrator’s. She has learned to play both parts: the person caught up in her feelings and the ironist who sees them from above. She has become a writer.