Dora: A Headcase

Hold a basketball under water, take your hand away, and it'll surface with the powerhouse force of the suppressed. Welcome to Lidia Yuknavitch's world. In Dora: A Headcase, Yuknavitch reimagines the girl, the woman, at the heart of Sigmund Freud's breakthrough case study and unleashes this character's fury against a backdrop of hypocritical adulthood. Yuknavitch is talking back to a hundred years, to the founding of psychoanalysis. I'd like to think she wrote parts of this novel just for me, but so many readers will feel that way. Yuknavitch has wrestled with the force of her own convictions and given a powerful voice to a badass character born on the literary landscape. MONICA DRAKE author of Clown Girl Dora is too much for Sigmund Freud but she's just right for us--raunchy, sharp and so funny it hurts. KATHERINE DUNN author of Geek Love In these times there's no reason for a novel to exist unless it's dangerous, provocative and not like anything that's come before. Dora: A Headcase is that kind of novel. It's dirty, sexy, rude, smart, soulful, fresh and risky. Think of your favorite out-there genius writer; multiply by ten, add a big heart, a poet's ear, and a bad girl's courage, and you've got Lidia Yuknavitch. KAREN KARBO, author of How Georgia Became O'Keeffe Dora: A Head Case is first and foremost an irreverent portrait of a smart seventeen year old trying to survive. It channels Sigmund Freud and his young patient Dora and is both a hilarious critique and an oddly touching homage. With an unerring ear and a very keen eye, Lidia Yuknavitch casts a very special slant of light on our centuries and our lives. Put simply, the book is needed. CAROLE MASO author of Defiance and The Art Lover Snappy and fun. I can pretty much guarantee you haven't met a character quite l like Ida before. BLAKE NELSON author of Girl and Paranoid Park In Dora, [Lidia Yuknavitch] takes the most classic model of Thera-tainment, personal-crisis-as-content, and she re-imagines it wonderfully reversed. The world of Dora is not just possible, it's inevitable. It's revenge as the ultimate therapy. From the introduction by CHUCK PALAHNIUK author of Damned When about to plummet to our deaths or fly we speak in a language all our own. Dora: A Headcase is a feminist retelling of Freud's famous case study, Dora. But the novel constantly transcends this conceit in beautiful and surprising ways. Sure there's literary discourse and feminist asides, feats of craft and vision, but in the end Yuknavitch drives narrative the way rednecks drive muscle cars. Right across your lawn without respect to boundaries. If Ida is a little scary to some readers, it's only because we've forgotten that nothing is scarier than a teenage girl. They whisper things we don't want to hear-- that sometimes cutting is an act of freedom, like meditating without sleep, or starving yourself for the parallel bars. Also, that it's damn hard to do the right thing when you're in a dangerous conversation with the universe, one meant for god's ears alone. Personally as someone whose teen years were hellish, I was floored by the softness and raw sorrow in Ida's voice, which Yuknavitch braided in with the anger. It felt more real, more like the girls I knew and was, than any other coming of age narrator. Put simply, Yuknavitch has written the best portrait of teen girlhood I have ever read. I loved this book--it's like a smart, fast chick Fight Club. In twenty years, I hope to wake up in a world where Dora: A Headcase has replaced Catcher in the Rye on high school reading lists for the alienated. I'm pretty sure that world would be a better one. VANESSA VESELKA, author of Zazen