Over on Facebook, there’s been a public mourning over the death of Geek Love
author Katherine Dunn as intense as the passing of Prince. It’s not as huge a population, but it’s as devoted. My friend Mitchell said, “I see Olympia everywhere.” I do too. The characters stalk your dreams. People who have read it say they are “haunted” by it. Because Katherine Dunn didn’t write too many novels, and the novels she did write came almost 20 years apart, there’s even more of a mystique around her. Geek Love exploded like a bomb in 1989. And then … silence. Of course she WASN’T silent. She wrote about boxing, she was a sports journalist for various newspapers, she traveled around covering boxing matches. This is not the “norm” for a writer who writes a book like Geek Love. And that made it almost better. Geek Love was not a book like any other book, and so it was perfect that the author would not be like other authors. When Dunn died, I did a Search on my site to see what I had already written about her over the years, and came across this fragment of hilarity: snippets of conversation between me and Michael, an old flame, who came and stayed with me for a week in 2006. And this is (some of) what we talked about. I didn’t even remember this post, and I read some of that and laughed out loud. I sent it to Michael and he was roaring too. The Fuck buddy moment? Libertarian Magicians?? What the hell. It’s a great snapshot of our friendship. But anyway, back then we discussed Katherine Dunn, which is why that forgotten post came up in Search, and the substance of that conversation is something I’ve talked about with other friends who loved Geek Love. Geek Love (at least my copy, and it was the first paperback copy) had no author photo. You couldn’t “attach” anything to her. It was just her voice and the characters she created. Katherine Dunn was a complete and utter mystery at the time, and you couldn’t Google her. It was perfect that I had no idea what she looked like. And because the characters in Geek Love are “freaks” and “geeks” on the sideshow circuit, and because it’s a first-person narration, it made you wonder … Of course, it’s even better that all of the characters came from her imagination, but still: we all talked about Katherine Dunn, and who we imagined her to be all the time.
With the advent of the Internet, it was easier to keep track of Katherine Dunn. And whenever you heard anything about her, it was always fascinating, and unexpected. Yes, of course, it would have been great if she had written more novels … or maybe it wouldn’t have been. I always missed her. I always wished I had heard more from her. Hers was one of the most essential and unique voices to come along in a long LONG time. Sorry, but Geek Love blows away anything that any of the Big Kahuna Men – like DeLillo or Jonathan Franzen or whoever – have ever attempted, or even dreamt of.
Yesterday, I was Googling around finding interviews with Dunn (there aren’t many, at least not recently), and came across a wonderful 2010 interview she gave to the Paris Review. There is so much great stuff. A couple of things I love, emblematic of why I love her, and why I find her so inspirational:
Twenty years is a long time for something to gel, what has happened?
I don’t want to be glib here, but twenty years worth of life and work happened. Some might say I’m right on schedule by my lights.
Is being a woman advantageous or disadvantageous for ringside reporting?
Thirty years ago it was an advantage because at most fights the lines to the women’s restroom were short.
Do you box?
No, I’ve never competed. I did, however, train in a boxing gym with a good coach beginning in 1993… Last November a young woman tried to snatch my purse on the street. I punched her out until the cavalry arrived. Most fun I’ve had in years.
