“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.”

An excerpt from an interview with Katherine Dunn in The Paris Review. She has a new short story in this edition of The Paris Review, and if you follow Dunn’s career, then you know this is a huge event. People have been Twittering and Facebook-ing about it for days. A short story! Light from the caves! We are members of a strange intense cult, Katherine Dunn fans. There’s an excerpt of the story on the Paris Review site, but I refuse to read a word until I buy the issue and can read the whole thing.

Here is what I wrote, a while back, about Geek Love, her second novel, published in 1989, which brought her the fame that lasts till this day.

Geek Love – by Katherine Dunn

The less said about this book the better.

All I can do is tell you to read it. But don’t ever say that I didn’t warn you.

I read it years ago when I was living in Philadelphia and quietly having a nervous breakdown that didn’t show to the outside world. I was sitting on my front porch when I finished Geek Love. We lived in Mt. Airy, surrounded by forest preserves and mountain bike trails, a lushness of green only twenty minutes outside the city proper. Trees overhung the porch, the trees pressed up against our house from all sides, the street was misty and quiet. I had a big mug of cold coffee next to me. The coffee had been hot when I came out onto the porch but I was near the end of the book and so I sat there reading, struck dumb and still by the ending, not taking one sip from the cup next to me. At the last sentence of the book, I burst into tears. That’s only happened to me a couple of times at the end of a book. Sometimes I’ll mist up … get moved in an intellectual way … but a bursting into sobs is something that has rarely happened. Geek Love pierced through the armor I had erected to shield me from how depressed I was, how sad, how lonely, and it wasn’t just about me, and what I was going through … it was about Olympia and Arturo and the unforgettable cast of characters in the book. To me, Geek Love is a book about love (obviously, with that title), but it’s also about flaws, and freaks (literal and emotional), and emotional blackmail that can twist a soul already hardened by the world’s rejection. Our outer surface so rarely reflect our inner worlds. What does it mean to be ugly? Empirically ugly? As in, you make your living as a freak in a freak show? What does love mean then? Inside we may be pure and clean. But outside we present a horrifying visage to the world. Beneath all of this, keens love. Love eternal, love good, love that burns so hot that it is indistinguishable from pain. My boyfriend came home from his run and found me lying on the wicker couch on the front porch, drenched in tears. I don’t think I stopped crying, not really, for a good 2 days after finishing that book. I have never picked it up since.

It’s like a strange little club – those of us who have read the book. It’s a bit of a litmus test. If someone says, “I loved Geek Love” … I am immediately drawn to that person, like a moth to the flame … who are you, it says something about you that THAT would be your favorite … One of the falling-in-love moments I had with the great love of my life was during a “what books do you love” conversation. I said, casually, “I don’t think I’ve ever cried harder when a book ended than when I finished Geek Love.” He looked at me as though I had struck him. He seriously did a double-take. But then didn’t say anything for a while. He wasn’t a big “let me share with you every thought that goes through my head” type of guy. He was a bit shyer than that. The conversation went on. I had noticed his response but didn’t really “get” it … and later, a couple of people came over and joined us, interrupting our tete a tete – and he said to me, privately, underneath the chatter of the other people, “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who also has read that book.”

It meant something to him that I had read it and loved it. It meant something about who I am.

It’s that kind of book.

One of the most assaultive books I have ever read. With prose you could cut with a knife. A truly original voice.

I can’t even bring myself to give a plot summary.

Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of the book.

EXCERPT FROM Geek Love – by Katherine Dunn

Now Crystal Lil holds the phone receiver clenched against her long flat tit while she howls up the stairwell, “Forty-one!”, meaning that the red-haired, zit-skinned, defrocked Benedictine in room Number 41 has another phone call and should come running down the three flights of stairs and take this intruding burden off Lil’s confused mind. She puts a patented plastic amplifier against the earpiece when she answers the phone and turns the knob on her hearing aid to high and screams, “What! What!” into the mouthpiece until she gets a number back. That number she will shriek up the mildewed staircase until someone comes down or she gets tired.

I am never sure how deaf she is. She always hears the ring of the pay phone in the hall but she may pick up its vibration in her slipper heels. She is also blind. Her thick, pink plastic glasses project huge filmy eyes. The blurred red spurts across her whites like a bad egg.

Forty-one rattles down the stairs and grabs the receiver. He is in constant communication with acquaintances on the edge of the clergy, cultivating them in hopes of slinking back into his collar. His anxious muttering into the phone begins as Crystal Lil careens back into her room. She leaves the door open to the hallway.

Her window looks onto the sidewalk in front of the building. Her television is on with the volume high. She sits on the backless kitchen chair, feels around for the large magnifying glass until she finds it on top of the TV, and then leans close, her nose scant inches from the screen, pumping the lens in and out before her eyes in a constant struggle to focus an image around the dots. When i come through the hall I can see the grey light flickering through the lens onto the eager blindness of her face.

Being called “Manager” explains, for Crystal Lil, why no bills come to her, why her room is free, and why the small check arrives for her each month. She is adamant in her duties as rent collector and enfeebled watchdog. The phone is part of the deal.

When Crystal Lil howls, “Twenty-one!”, which is my room number, I stop by my door to grab the goat wig from its nail and jam it onto my bald pate before I take the single flight of stairs in a series of one-legged hops that is hard on my knees and ankles but disguises my usual shuffle. I pitch my voice high and loud, an octave into the falsetto. “Thank you!” I shriek at her gaping mouth. Her gums are knnobby and a faintly iridescent green – shiny where the teeth were. I wear the same wig when I go out. I don’t trust Lil’s blindness or her deafness to disguise me completely. I am, after all, her daughter. She might harbor some decayed hormonal recognition of my rhythms that could penetrate even the wall of refusal her body has thrown up against the world.

When Lil calls, “Thirty-five!” up the stairwell, I wobble over to the door and stare one-eyed through the hole drilled next to the lock. When “Thirty-five” comes hurtling down the staircase, I get an instant glimpse of her long legs, sometimes flashing bare through the slits in her startling green kimono. I lean my head against the door and listen to her strong young voice shouting at Lil and then dropping to its normal urgency on the phone. Number Thirty-five is my daughter, Miranda. Miranda is a popular girl, tall and well shaped. She gets phone calls every evening before she leaves for work. Miranda does not try to disguise herself from her grandmother. She believes herself to be an orphan named Barker. And Crystal Lil herself must imagine that Miranda is just one more of the gaudy females who trail their sex like slug slime over the rooms for a month at a time before moving on. Perhaps the fact that Miranda has lived here in the big apartment for three years has never penetrated to Lil. How would she notice that the same “Thirty-five” always answers the call? They have no bridge to each other. I am the only link between them, and neither of them knows me. Miranda, though, has far less reason to remember me than the old woman does.

This is my selfish pleasure, to watch unseen. It wouldn’t give them pleasure to know me for who I am. It could kill Lily, bringing back all the rot of the old pain. Or she might hate me for surviving when all her other treasures have sunk into mold. As for Miranda, I can’t be sure what it would do to her to know her real mother. I imagine her bright spine cringing and slumping and staying that way. She makes a gallant orphan.

We are all three Binewskis, though only Lily claims the name. I am just “Number Twenty-one” to Crystal Lil. Or “McGurk, the cripple in Twenty-one”. Miranda is more colorful. I’ve heard her whispering to friends as they pass my door, “The dwarf in Twenty-one,” or “The old albino hunchback in Twenty-one.”

I rarely need to speak to either of them. Lil puts the rent checks in a basket just inside her open door and I reach to get them. On Thursdays I take out the garbage and Lily thinks nothing of it.

Miranda says hello in the hall. I nod. Occasionally she tries to chat me up on the stairs. I am distant and brief and escape as quickly as possible with my heart pounding like a burglar’s.

Lily chose to forget me and I choose not to remind her, but I am terrified of seeing shame or disgust in my daughter’s face. It would kill me. So I stalk and tend them both secretly, like a midnight gardener.