Katie Bennett’s hybrid memoir intertwines her artistic coming-of-age with the story of Joan Vollmer and her murder by Beat author William Burroughs.
She Was Wild Grass by Katie Bennett. Brink, 2026. 232 pages.Buy on Bookshop.org
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“SHOOT THE BITCH and write a book.”
As it did with you just now, that line—William S. Burroughs’s 1997 advice to a young writer—got Katie Bennett’s attention when she read it on New Year’s Day in 2020. At a New Year’s party almost a decade before, Bennett had been raped by a stranger. The coincidence of the timing of her reading and the casual reference to gendered violence spurred Bennett to find out more about the woman Burroughs actually did shoot.
Joan Vollmer died at the age of 28 in Mexico City in 1951, the same age as Bennett that winter in New York in 2020. Burroughs, Vollmer’s common-law husband, shot her dead in what he explained to the police was a drunken party trick gone awry—a game of “William Tell,” in which he attempted to shoot a glass, rather than an apple, off her head. (He later changed his story, on the advice of an attorney, to an “accidental discharge.”) Burroughs is, of course, a household name in literary circles—Daniel Craig just starred in Luca Guadagnino’s 2024 film adaptation of the author’s semi-autobiographical novel Queer (1985)—but I also recall talking with friends about his 1959 novel Naked Lunch in hushed, impressed tones when I was a teenager. I remember thinking of Burroughs, along with fellow Beat writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, as talented, devil-may-care rebels revered for burning brightly, for not shying away from madness. I do not recall knowing that Burroughs had murdered his wife at point-blank range.
In her new book She Was Wild Grass, Katie Bennett offers a hybrid memoir of her artistic coming-of-age and Ukrainian family history, intertwined with a case for Vollmer’s proper place in the Beat pantheon. The book braids the stories of Bennett’s modern-day struggles with events from Vollmer’s life in the 1940s. She explores Vollmer’s intelligence and aesthetic potential, despite her not leaving behind an “extensive paper trail.” Bennett observes that she, too, would not have left much published work behind if she had died at 28. (Even Burroughs did not publish his first book, or much of anything else, until 1953, when he was almost 40.)
This identification with her subject leads Bennett to use Vollmer as a vehicle for considering her own place as a woman in the arts and in the world. Some of the connections she draws are stronger than others, but the project sheds light on the risks and rewards of creative and intellectual ambition, the value in critiquing language and modes of storytelling that implicate gendered violence, and the too-common vanishing of women’s contributions in both the arts and family life.
Vollmer—despite not having published a book before her death—was a key influence on the Beat ideology of radical thinking, experimental writing, drug exploration, sexual liberation, and social boundary breaking. Beat writer Herbert Huncke noted that “her remarks never failed to start action of some kind.” Alongside her friend and roommate Edie Parker, she led parties and discussions in their New York apartment about “social freedom and spontaneous literary composition” that were seen as integral to the growing movement. Vollmer introduced Kerouac to the work of Proust and Burroughs to the Mayan codices. In addition to Bennett’s book, there have been other efforts to revive Vollmer’s legacy, from magazine articles (including a 2022 essay in Literary Hub that was the seed of Bennett’s book) to a larger biographical work by Catherine C. Marshall and Simon R. Johnson, Ordinary Stupid People: Joan Vollmer’s Life Before the Beats Began (2024).
Bennett braids her story with Vollmer’s through a striking series of short vignettes that amount to a “memoir-plus.” The book is broken into three parts: the first involves Bennett’s discovery of Vollmer and passages about Vollmer’s early life and family; the second includes Bennett’s separation from her husband and her work on a magazine commission on Vollmer, paired with passages about Vollmer and Burroughs’s troubled life leading up to her death in Mexico City; the third describes Bennett’s reunion with her husband and her move to Philadelphia, as well as the aftermath of Vollmer’s death.
The project is at once a work of historical research and a voyage of personal discovery. The short sections are rich with information and narrative detail, and despite its fractured form, the book reads smoothly thanks to its short, artful sentences and detached, candid tone. Bennett threads the dense bits of history with anecdotes about her youthful nights in Upstate New York with her partner and friends, waiting for something great to happen. Bennett’s method of examining her own path through the lens of Vollmer’s life references Maggie Nelson, whose books Jane: A Murder (2005) and The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial (2007) told her own story while uncovering that of her eponymous aunt, murdered at the age of 23. As Nelson explained (and Bennett affirms in her own treatment), “Jane is about identification, not fusion.”
Bennett’s artistic excavation of Vollmer’s tragic life is a wresting-back of control, a callback to her own assault. Writing this manuscript was a reclamation of power after the loss of it. By considering how Vollmer’s treatment in the history of the Beat movement has served to disempower her and remove her agency, while at the same time exposing the latent cultural factors that contribute to the ubiquity of gendered harm or erasure, Bennett seeks to resurrect Vollmer’s legacy as she claims her own.
She Was Wild Grass hums with palpable tension. It’s full of longing, almost of desperation. Bennett as author is young and hungry, like Vollmer was. She, too, struggles with the conflict between her desire for a certain type of domesticity—a white wedding to husband Francis, children, and a home of her own—and her assessment of how this desire constrains her reach as an artist. In the memoir passages, Bennett loosely relates Vollmer’s rebellious lifestyle to her own substance abuse while in college, as well as her starving-artist life in Schenectady, New York, in a home with a crumbling stairwell, birds in the walls, and a rotating cast of musician and tattoo artist roommates. Her husband played drums in her band before focusing on his own music. The lifestyle parallels are less convincing—the two women differ vastly, which Bennett notes at key moments—but that is perhaps not the point.
Both Vollmer and Burroughs lived chaotic, sexually expansive, outlaw lives, including arrests for public indecency, forging prescriptions for morphine, and battling alcohol, heroin, and Benzedrine addictions. But while Burroughs’s dabblings in drugs “make him sleek, deep, artfully reckless,” Vollmer’s personal chaos is viewed as “a shame.” She is admitted to Bellevue Hospital for amphetamine psychosis and other issues. Meanwhile, Burroughs spends a lot of time playing with and posing with guns (he eventually published a book titled Painting & Guns in 1992). Along with Julie, Vollmer’s daughter from her first marriage, the couple relocates to Texas, where they purchase 99 acres to grow pot and poppy seeds for opium. While Vollmer was giving birth to their son, Bill Jr., his father was reported to have sat in the car drinking.
The story shifts when Burroughs is arrested for drug possession in New Orleans, which prompts the couple’s ultimate flight to Mexico. Letters and documents show that he leans on Vollmer: a doctor calls him “grossly dependent” on her, despite his frequent disappearances with male lovers, while Vollmer has her own love affairs, as well as depression, self-destructive tendencies, and addictions—all while caring for her children. Vollmer, who had been married twice before Burroughs, files for, but does not finalize, a divorce.
Bennett argues that the prevailing narrative of Vollmer’s murder, as a provocative anecdote in the checkered history of Burroughs as a larger-than-life figure, “undermines the seriousness of the act and contributes to cultural permissiveness toward violence against women.” Much of the language surrounding Vollmer’s death—including Burroughs’s injunction to “shoot the bitch”—Bennett identifies as a method of erasure, a kind of social sanction of violence toward women. Vollmer’s personal instability is painted not as artfully tragic but as inextricable from a fate of being murdered by gunshot. The Beat writers and defenders essentially claim that she wanted him to kill her. Burroughs wrote that Vollmer’s “brain drew the bullet toward it.” Ginsberg recalled that he had “ always thought that she had kind of challenged him into it—that it was sort of like using him to […] get her off the earth,” and translator and critic Jorge García-Robles, author of the 2013 book The Stray Bullet: William S. Burroughs in Mexico, wrote that “Joan deserved Burroughs; she chose him, after all. What did she choose? Death.”
This casual erasure of the act’s gravity is underscored by Burroughs’s further disappearing of counternarratives—specifically, his disposal of Vollmer’s journals. There is no way now to know the value of their contents, but given Vollmer’s noted rhetorical skills and avant-garde tendencies, there is every possibility that this material could have been posthumously published, as Edie Parker’s memoir, You’ll Be Okay: My Life with Jack Kerouac (2007), was. But that was not to be, and while Bennett mourns what has been lost, she also acknowledges that Vollmer can’t be categorized as a classic “Overlooked Female Artist” since she did not leave behind a significant body of work.
Instead, Bennett focuses her effort on excavating her potential: what could have been. She poses the thesis that writers “aren’t defined by the pages they produce or publish. And Joan is interesting whether or not she wrote.” While the latter statement holds—Vollmer comes across as incredibly compelling—the former is up for debate. A writer may not be defined by the pages they publish, but certainly by the pages they produce. The sad fact is that no one really knows what Vollmer might have produced had she lived, and Burroughs’s destruction of her journals renders the question of what she did produce moot.
Regardless of the existence of a literary record, published or unpublished, Bennett makes a case for the value of lived, often unrecorded reality. She argues that Vollmer’s rhetorical and literary influence via her salons, as well as her sheer “dailiness, small pleasures, and boredom,” should be counted as significant. Bennett references historian Bonnie Smith’s 1998 book The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice to argue that the ephemera of women’s lives—“scrapbooks, embroidery, diaries, letters”—are “intentionally discarded as insignificant” (a highly relevant fact considering the great literary value placed on the ephemeral writings of the male Beats). Bennett argues for the value of everydayness while acknowledging the unknowability of the past. She wrestles with how to tell a story when so much is absent, at times reconstructing moments she imagines might have happened. In this wide-ranging approach, history itself becomes a living thing, an act of “creation and regeneration.”
Bennett relates this more regenerative, expansive view of the past to her attempts to understand her unknowable Ukrainian-speaking grandmother, Anastasia. In a parallel to Burroughs tossing out Vollmer’s journals after her death, Anastasia threw away all her own belongings the year before she died. Bennett recovers a single item her grandmother created: a needlepoint portrait of Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, who died in 1861. It’s a piece of handcrafted art, showing that Anastasia’s life involved more than the time she spent taking care of her husband and children. Bennett calls the portrait an “autobiography of her attention and desire”—not a traditional piece of archival material but a woman’s everyday stitchwork.
Without much of Vollmer’s writing to speak for itself, Bennett uses what she has—letters, testimonials, a high school short story about a trumpet player inducing an ecstatic end of the world—to paint a fuller picture of Vollmer’s life. Bennett dissects Vollmer’s letters, noting the observation of Burroughs’s biographer Barry Miles that she was “clearly a good writer.” She reviews the well-documented mayhem and itinerant nature of the literary couple’s life, while at the same time highlighting pleasant moments pulled from letters: picking blackberries with her children, playing records with her friends. Bennett admits that it is impossible to reckon with the complexity and strangeness of a person from the past—indeed, it’s hard enough to get a handle on people we actually know.
At its core, She Was Wild Grass explores both survival and the tension between the security and value of socially prescribed roles and the thrills and risks of artistic freedom. There’s a nagging question posed throughout: what if Bennett, a female musician and writer, doesn’t manage to produce a significant body of work either? Of course, in working through this very anxiety, Bennett has disproved it—she has produced this haunting, compelling, thought-provoking book.
LARB Contributor
Gina Tomaine is a writer and editor in Philadelphia whose work has been featured in The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, NPR, The Cut, Vice, Dazed, and Longreads, among others. She has been nominated for an ASME National Magazine Award and a City and Regional Magazine Award.
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