Table of Contents
Praise for Dora: A Headcase
Hold a basketball underwater, take your hand away, and itll surface with the powerhouse force of the suppressed. Welcome to Lidia Yuknavitchs world. In Dora: A Headcase, Yuknavitch reimagines the girl, the woman, at the heart of Sigmund Freuds breakthrough case study and unleashes this characters fury against a backdrop of hypocritical adulthood. Yuknavitch is talking back to a hundred years, to the founding of psychoanalysis. Id 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 shes just right for us raunchy, sharp, and so funny it hurts.
KATHERINE DUNN, author of Geek Love
In these times theres no reason for a novel to exist unless its dangerous, provocative, and not like anything thats come before. Dora: A Headcase is that kind of novel. Its dirty, sexy, rude, smart, soulful, fresh, and risky. Think of your favorite out-there genius writer; multiply by ten, add a big heart, a poets ear, and a bad girls courage, and youve got Lidia Yuknavitch.
KAREN KARBO, author of How Georgia Became OKeeffe
Dora: A Headcase 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 havent met a character quite 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 reimagines it wonderfully reversed. The world of Dora is not just possible, its inevitable. Its 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 Freuds famous case study, Dora. But the novel constantly transcends this conceit in beautiful and surprising ways. Sure theres 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, its only because weve forgotten that nothing is scarier than a teenage girl. They whisper things we dont want to hear that sometimes cutting is an act of freedom, like meditating without sleep, or starving yourself for the parallel bars. Also, that its damn hard to do the right thing when youre in a dangerous conversation with the universe, one meant for gods ears alone.
Personally as someone whose teen years were hellish, I was floored by the softness and raw sorrow in Idas 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 its 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. Im pretty sure that world would be a better one.
VANESSA VESELKA, author of Zazen
Praise for The Chronology of Water
Oregon Book Award Finalist 2012
Pacific Northwest Books Associati0n Award Winner 2011
The Oregonian, Best Books of the Year 2011
Willamette Week, Top 10 Portland Books Frsom 2011
Portland Mercury, Best Portland Book Releases of 2011
The Nervous Breakdown, Best Books of 2011
Art Faccia, Best Books of 2011
Flooded with light and incandescent beauty, Lidia Yuknavitchs The Chronology of Water cuts through the heart of the reader. These fierce life stories gleam, fiery images passing just beneath the surface of the pages. You will feel rage, fear, release, and joy, and you will not be able to stop reading this deeply brave and human voice.
DIANA ABU-JABER, author of Origin: A Novel
I love this book and I am thankful that Lidia Yuknavitch has written it for me and for everyone else who has ever had to sometimes kind of work at staying alive. Its about the body, brain, and soul of a woman who has managed to scratch up through the slime and concrete and crap of life in order to resurrect herself. The kind of book Janis Joplin might have written if she had made it through the fire raw, tough, pure, more full of love than you thought possible and sometimes even hilarious. This is the book Lidia Yuknavitch was put on the planet to write for us.
REBECCA BROWN, author of The Gifts of the Body
All sex scenes were shit, except for the sex written by Lidia Yuknavitch. She read us the first chapter of her novel Small Backs of Children (due out with Hawthorne Books) while we all followed along with the copies shed passed out. They say that alcoholics remember their first drink, that lightening feeling in your body that says yes-yes-lets-feel-this-way-all-the-time well, I will always remember the first time I heard Lidia Yuknavitch read.
CHELSEACAIN, author of Evil at Heart
This intensely powerful memoir touches depths yet unheard of in contemporary writing. I read it at one sitting and wondered for days after about love, time, and truth. Cant get me any more excited than this.
ANDREI CODRESCU, author of The Poetry Lesson
From the moment I picked up The Chronology of Water,
I couldnt put it down, and I thought about it long after Id finished. Rarely do you find talent like Lidia Yuknavitchs. Reading this book is like diving into Yuknavitchs most secret places, where, really, we all want memoir to take us, but it so rarely does. The reader emerges wiser, enlightened, and changed.
KERRY COHEN, author of Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity
Ive read Ms. Yuknavitchs book The Chronology of Water, cover to cover, a dozen times. I am still reading it. And I will, most likely, return to it for inspiration and ideas, and out of sheer admiration, for the rest of my life. The book is extraordinary.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, author of Pygmy
The Chronology of Waters central metaphor works beautifully: we all keep our heads above water, look around, and enjoy our corporeal life despite all the reasons not to; beyond that, the book is immensely impressive to me on a human level: the narrator/speaker/protagonist/author emerges from a seriously hellish childhood and spooky adolescence into a middle age not of bliss, certainly, but of convincing engagement and satisfaction.
