In her novel “Geek Love,” Katherine Dunn created a family of characters who view their abnormalities and outsider status as evidence of their superiority to “norms.”
,” on spec just after the first two were published, but they later rejected it. She rewrote and submitted the novel to publishers for the next eight or nine years, but couldn’t get it published. Dunn then reëvaluated her approach to writing a novel.
In “Attic,” Dunn introduced an early version of the sinister magic realism she would later make famous in “Geek Love.” The book’s narrator, K. Dunn, describes a carrousel in which, to gain entry, young boys have to shoot arrows into their mothers’ vaginas and young girls have to throw hoops over their father’s erections. “If they don’t make it in four tries they can’t ride the merry-go-round so the Mommies spread their legs wider and wider and the Daddies sweat to rub up a good one.
The book is quiet—Sally is reading Proust as she contemplates her past—but there are moments of acute emotional violence, as Dunn returns to the theme of shame. One scene, when college-aged Sally humiliates a romantic rival, is particularly bracing. “Why is it that your odd, slimy romp is always initiated with a knock at the door of your room in the middle of the night?” Sally asks.
In 1977, Dunn was living in a four-hundred-square-foot studio in Northwest Portland where her son, Eli Dapolonia, slept in the closet. She worked mornings waiting tables at the Stepping Stone Café and nights tending bar at the Earth Tavern, where she became known for her effective, if flamboyant, approach to breaking up fights: she would jump onto the aggressor’s back and hold on until he relented.
This note was likely somewhere in Dunn’s consciousness on a sunny day, a few weeks later, when she tried to get Eli to go for a walk with her. Eli refused; he wasn’t in the mood. Dunn went anyway, up to Portland’s International Rose Test Garden, where, inspired by the genetically engineered flowers and their extraordinary patterns, she realized she could’ve perhaps designed “a more obedient son.” As she explained tomagazine, in 2014, Dunn then had a second thought.
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