I Love Dick has the status of a cult novel among young feminists and fashionistas. Lena Dunham is a fan. Sheila Heti says reading it tore down assumptions “of what the form can handle”. Part memoir, part fiction, Kraus’s account of the devastation – and creative ferment – that is unrequited love was a sensation when it was first published in the US in 1997. And now we get a UK edition.

The book opens as Chris Kraus, an experimental film-maker, 39, and her husband Sylvère Lotringer, 56 (spoiler alert: Kraus was once married to a philosopher called Sylvère Lotringer), spend a boozy night with a cultural critic called Dick. Chris is convinced Dick is flirting with her. By the next day he has become a full-blown erotic obsession.

Although jealous, Sylvère joins in the game. The couple collaborate on letters to Dick. For the first time in years Chris seems animated and alive. The couple’s sex life (dead for years) reignites, but Chris is now hopelessly in love with Dick – who never replies. Over the next year she sends him 200 letters, full of rapturous longing, but also with her views on literature, madness, the 1980s New York art scene, US imperialism, her adolescence growing up in New Zealand.

At first it’s hard to warm to Chris. She’s desperate, narcissistic – and what about her poor husband? But embedded in the narrative are clues. Chris has little economic independence (it’s all about Sylvère’s career). Her passion project, a film called Gravity & Grace (inspired by the Simone Weil book) has failed. Sylvère might be her protector now, but when they first got together, he would only meet her for “kinky sex” in his lunch hour. Even when they married, she had to leave the house whenever his daughter came to stay. There were abortions, compromises, constant moves to accommodate his career. You begin to understand why Dick might become a fantasy projection.

What stops this from being another midlife crisis tale is the way Chris begins to see the world through a feminist prism

The skill of the book allows the reader to enter into the fantasy (the one sex scene is torturous, but hot) while knowing it’s destructive and one-sided. Chris recognises how vulnerable – ridiculous even – infatuation has made her. But she glories in the surrender.

What stops I Love Dick from being yet another tale of midlife crisis is the way Chris begins to see the world through a feminist prism. Now that she has found her writing voice, it enrages her that female artists are criticised for using first-person confession, while men are praised for fictionalising their “characters”. “The ‘serious’ contemporary hetero-male novel is a thinly veiled Story of Me,” she writes. “When women try to pierce this false conceit by naming names because our ‘I’s’ are changing as we meet other ‘I’s, we’re called bitches, libellers, pornographers and amateurs.” You can see why Dunham was impressed.

This is a brilliant, experimental rollercoaster of a book. Yes, it can be pretentious (there’s lots of name dropping, with cameos from David Byrne, Kathy Acker and Amanda Plummer). But there’s something radical about a woman who pushes herself to the edge, finally to recover her stalled career. Dick is never a worthy love object, of course. You want to slap him (and not in a good way).

But gradually Chris begins to see how the letters could be turned into an art project (fellow art-stalkers Sophie Calle and Paul Auster are also namechecked in the book).

Of course when you finish this slim volume with the explosive title, the fun begins. Look up Kraus and you’ll find out Dick is based on British media theorist Dick Hebdige. Kraus has gone on to write other novels, which also riff on a love triangle. She and Sylvère are no longer married (but he’s warmly credited in the acknowledgments). So is it all true? Arguably it doesn’t matter. As Chris writes in her first letter to Dick: “The game is real, or even better than, reality, and better than is what it’s all about.”

I Love Dick is published by Serpent’s Tail (£12.99). Click here to buy it for £10.39