R.I.P. Katherine Dunn

“I have been a believer in the magic of language since, at a very early age, I discovered that some words got me into trouble and others got me out.”
-Katherine Dunn

In 2009, a news story emerged from the Pacific Northwest that author Katherine Dunn, known mainly for her 1989 novel Geek Love, had fought off a mugging attempt by slapping the thief in the face, and kicking the thief in the shins. Katherine Dunn was 64 at the time, and the mugger was mid-20s. The image was so pleasing. Any time I heard news of “Katherine Dunn”, I felt a surge of adrenaline and excitement, and this story made me think: “Of course. Of course she would make the news for something like that.”

The fact that she fought back was not a surprise, since Katherine Dunn spent the majority of her life covering boxing as a sports journalist. She also trained as a boxer. She had been a bartender, a waitress, a stripper, and she spent most of her time around boxers and tough guys. So, you know, she was not going to just let some asshole take her purse without a fight.

I got the news yesterday that Katherine Dunn died, at the age of 70.

I’ve been staring at the computer screen trying to think of what to say next. Katherine Dunn is so meaningful to me, and Geek Love was so important that any words I say will just sound melodramatic or like an exaggeration, or … empty? I don’t know. Katherine Dunn blasted me into wordlessness with Geek Love, and after that, for all time, all I could do was say to people, “Read it. Just read it. Trust me. Just read it.” Because what else is there to say? The book says it all. (Of course it’s on my Recommended Fiction list.) I have written about Geek Love over the years, as it turns out, here on my site (a quick Search showed me that), but most of it is inarticulate, and most of it just describes my reaction after I came to the last sentence. Because of that reaction, Geek Love is my #1 most MEMORABLE reading experience, that’s for sure. Books have made me cry before. For sure. But not like THAT. A bursting STORM the second I read the final sentence, that undid me for the rest of the day. My boyfriend had to take care of me as though I had experienced a deep personal loss. Which I had. It was the loss experienced when one takes off one’s blinders, it was the loss of Illusion and the belief in said Illusions. None of which I could put into words at the time.

Incidentally, it was Geek Love that started the process of me “waking up,” of me realizing I was living the wrong life. I was obediently following a path that was not MINE. The path I was on looked like the path of everyone around me (you date, you live together, you make plans together, you get married, you find jobs) … and so I couldn’t say what was wrong with it, and I felt myself that I was being ungrateful or weird in feeling SUCH a strong REJECTION of that path. Yes, I suppose you could say: “Well, Sheila, you were just dating the wrong person. Maybe it would have felt right with another man.” I think the life I’ve lived ever since then shows that as a lie. It’s the comforting lie that the “normals” tell the “weirdos.” Now, yes, of course, blah blah, we are all special, everyone is different, everyone has their problems, even people in white-picket-fence houses have their quirks. Sure. Yup. But there’s “different” and then there’s DIFFERENT. You see, the mainstream is so strong that the culture has absorbed it by osmosis. But it’s The Truman Show if you feel like none of that is “for you.” The norm is not the “norm” for all of us. What is freeing to you is a prison to me. But this is a difficult truth, an unwelcome truth to some (although that has always seemed strange to me: why does me “opting out” make YOU feel defensive?), and terrifying if you’re 22 years old and you don’t know what’s on the other side of that abyss. What will life look like if you don’t have the job/spouse/kids? All I know is is that I was young (21, 22), and I had such a strong sense of rejection inside of me that it made my relationship a torment (especially because I couldn’t verbalize what was wrong), and it made my life Hell. Granted, I had some other issues that I was unaware of at the time. But the fact remains. I was, in actuality, holding the brass ring of the culture, especially for young women. I had it. And I hated it. (I just reviewed The Lobster, coincidentally, which lampoons all of this.)

Geek Love was a wake-up call and I say that with no exaggeration. All along I had felt that something was wrong with ME, like why did I so vehemently not want the supposed awesomeness of what I HAD, which was: a relationship with a nice handsome responsible boyfriend, vacations and camping trips, long-term plans, even a sweet marriage proposal (which I said “No” to … I still don’t know where I found the balls to refuse. AND we were on a “romantic” vacation when I refused. Go, Sheila.) Geek Love said: “Not only CAN you say No to this whole version of life, you HAVE to say No to this.” (None of this was clear at the time. But the extreme reaction I had to the book was eloquent and in retrospect it is so obvious what was going on.)

Now, outside all of this personal stuff: Geek Love is a novel, not a self-help book, it’s not a cross-stitch sermon on the wall, and its truths are not cozy or easy to swallow. There is a price to pay for being a “geek.” You will pay it. But for the characters in the book, there is no other way. They are a circus sideshow family. They all have physical deformities which have turned them into a sensation on the sideshow circuit. The book would never pass the Tumblr test of how we are supposed to speak of physical challenges. Screw Tumblr. I have only read Geek Love once, that one time was enough, but the passages were burned into my cornea for all time. It would be impossible to make into a film (although Mitchell said, after he read it back in the day, that he could see it done as a cartoon, which I think is a brilliant idea). If you can make it past the grisly and gruesome opening sections, when you learn about the family (it’s not gruesome because of their deformities: the gruesome-ness goes way WAY beyond that – it actually turned my stomach and I thought I might have to put the book down) you will be rewarded riches beyond number. It is redemptive, in its way, but it is devastating in other ways. It is a book about withstanding loss. White-knuckling it. It is about love. It is about memories so terrible that life shatters, and forevermore there will only be pieces, fragments, nobody can be put back together again. And the lie – and it is a lie, and a very sinister lie – is that pieces so scattered can ever be put back together again. That lie (and it’s everywhere, from Oprah to life coaches to New-Age-woo-speak self-help books) is what makes people feel like “freaks”, or “geeks.” That lie is part of what drives people to suicide, addiction, anti-social behavior: the pressure to conform, the pressure to “put yourself together,” that putting yourself together is possible in any way, shape or form. Maybe its possible for SOME people but it is NOT possible for others. There will always be those who are on the “inside,” and those on the “outside.” Katherine Dunn’s book acknowledges that. And while such a harrowing experience could not really be called a “celebration,” it does, in the end, become a celebration. There is a price that must be paid. Nothing is free. Many people are unable to pay such a price. That’s the breaks. Katherine Dunn de-stabilizes the entire concept of “mainstream.”

Geek Love had a powerful impact – not just personally, but on a generation of writers. It was a “sui generis” book and Katherine Dunn was a sui generis writer, especially when you consider the fact that she didn’t move into the literary mainstream in any way whatsoever. She didn’t play the game like other people played it. She didn’t follow up Geek Love a couple years later with another novel, and then another novel, and then writing conferences, and short story collections, and personal essays, and a memoir, and you know the drill. That wasn’t her. She wrote it and then she vanished from the contemporary mainstream literary scene. She was a sports journalist and she covered boxing. There are a couple of collections of her boxing writing: One Ring Circus: Dispatches from the World of Boxing, and, in collaboration with photographer Jim Lommasson, Shadow Boxers: Sweat, Sacrifice & the Will to Survive in American Boxing Gyms, which won the 2004 Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize. There were other novels too: Attic, Truck. Plus the fascinating Death Scenes: A Homicide Detective’s Scrapbook.

In a conformist society, Katherine Dunn was an outlaw and a renegade. She followed her own star. You don’t realize how out of the ordinary it is until someone comes along and actually does it. There is no “set” path to being a writer, of course. However, in today’s world of MFA writing programs, and writers’ workshops which churn out young writers who all seem to write alike (a huge issue with such programs), having this woman emerge from (seemingly) out of nowhere and write a book that makes everything being published around it seem shallow and facile … is a moment of triumph for our culture. Sometimes things do work out. Sometimes the real cream actually does rise to the top. Sometimes something is SO good, and SO strongly itself, that 1. it cannot be compared to anything else and 2. its impact cannot be denied or explained away or ignored. A book like that feels inevitable once it arrives, but of course nothing is inevitable. Katherine Dunn had to dream it up. She had to sit down and write it.

I look at that picture of her above and I think: “She had Geek Love in her? WHERE did that book come from?”

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, although her stories of why she wrote it are fascinating, as well as important for writers to take a look at and try to absorb. Where do ideas come from? That is the question. What really matters is that Geek Love is here now, and it is ours. It will impact anyone who discovers it for generations to come. Once you’ve read the book, life immediately becomes unimaginable without it. I can count such books on one hand.

Rest in peace, Katherine Dunn.

From Geek Love:

Then there are those who feel their own strangeness and are terrified by it. They struggle toward normalcy. They suffer to exactly that degree that they are unable to appear normal to others, or to convince themselves that their aberration does not exist. These are true freaks, who appear, almost always, conventional and dull.