Dora: A Headcase Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Praise

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Chapter 1.

  Chapter 2.

  Chapter 3.

  Chapter 4.

  Chapter 5.

  Chapter 6.

  Chapter 7.

  Chapter 8.

  Chapter 9.

  Chapter 10.

  Chapter 11.

  Chapter 12.

  Chapter 13.

  Chapter 14.

  Chapter 15.

  Chapter 16.

  Chapter 17.

  Chapter 18.

  Chapter 19.

  Chapter 20.

  Chapter 21.

  Chapter 22.

  Chapter 23.

  Chapter 24.

  Chapter 25.

  Chapter 26.

  Chapter 27.

  Chapter 28.

  Chapter 29.

  Chapter 30.

  Chapter 31.

  Chapter 32.

  Chapter 33.

  Chapter 34.

  Epiloguish Thingee

  Because I Know You Want to Know

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright Page

  Praise for Dora: A Headcase

  Hold a basketball underwater, 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 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 haven’t 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, 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

  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 Yuknavitch’s 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. It’s 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 she’d passed out. They say that alcoholics remember their first drink, that lightening feeling in your body that says yes-yes-let’s-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. Can’t 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 couldn’t put it down, and I thought about it long after I’d finished. Rarely do you find talent like Lidia Yuknavitch’s. Reading this book is like diving into Yuknavitch’s 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

  I’ve read Ms. Yuknavitch’s 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 Water�
��s 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.

  DAVID SHIELDS, author of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

  Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir The Chronology of Water is a brutal beauty bomb and a true love song. Rich with story, alive with emotion, both merciful and utterly merciless, I am forever altered by every stunning page. This is the book I’m going to press into everyone’s hands for years to come. This is the book I’ve been waiting to read all of my life.

  CHERYL STRAYED, author of Torch

  This isn’t a memoir “about” addiction, abuse, or love: it’s a triumphantly unrelenting look at a life buoyed by the power of the written word.

  PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  I’m also convinced that this bold and highly unconventional book – hot, gritty, unrelenting in its push to dismantle the self and then, somehow, put the self back together again – gets not just under a reader’s skin but seeps all the way into her bloodstream.

  THE OREGONIAN

  Artfully described in prose that’s as spare and beautiful as a diver slicing through the water.

  FOREWORD REVIEWS

  Yuknavitch doesn’t use words just because they sound pretty. Her language, inventive and sparse, is determined to leave its readers spinning in realness, the physical grit of being present as a woman and as a human being.

  BITCH

  “Write like a terrorist just busted in and threatened to kill you all – like you have a semi-automatic machine gun at your skull,” acclaimed author Ken Kesey told Lidia Yuknavitch one day during a writing workshop. Luckily for us, she followed his advice, crowding The Chronology of Water with intimate confessions of rage and longing. She takes us on a journey through addiction, sexual exploration, and perhaps most intriguing of all, through creation: of literature, of memories, and of life. Her sharp prose – witty, jarring, worthy of dog-earing – alternates between gleeful postmodern exercise and wrenching elegy. So honest and unapologetic is her writing that you can practically hear her sigh in catharsis as you turn the pages.

  BUST

  The Chronology of Water is powerful and beautifully written – even the tough parts.

  SHELF AWARENESS

  Yuknavitch’s nonlinear memoir that is at times lyrical, at times conversational, and almost always intense.

  PLOUGHSHARES

  I love how physical the book is, both in its writing and in its point of view. Her body threatened to rise up from every single page I read. It’s war in there. I’m going back in.

  THE STRANGER

  Lidia Yuknavitch is a self-proclaimed language bandit. Other writers purposely disturb their readers’ comprehension, because, well, they want to change language as we know it. Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water plays with language, but it also brings an extra dimension to the wordsmith memoir: it’s a sputteringly good read.

  CHICAGO READER

  Literary prose that embraces the experience of being a female, in a female body, occupying space in the world – it doesn’t come along too often. But here it is, and it’s worth your attention.

  THE PORTLAND MERCURY

  Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water might well turn out to be the best book of the year; it’s unlike anything I’ve read before, and I haven’t been able to forget it.

  BOOKSLUT

  Lidia Yuknavitch’s unsparing memoir The Chronology of Water includes tragedy, abuse, oceanic booze consumption, and rated-X sexiness. And Ken Kesey, of course.

  PORTLAND MONTHLY

  I fucking loved this book and I strongly encourage anyone reading this to buy the book immediately and then keep it beneath your pillow or shove it down your pants or crack open your rib cage and hold the book next to your heart. It is really that beautiful and brilliant and any number of superlatives I will spare you from for the sake of decorum.

  HTMLGIANT

  Portland writer Lidia Yuknavitch seeks out conventions in life and art, then tears them down, in her exhaustively compelling memoir, The Chronology of Water, a book that is as much the making of a singular artistic voice as it is a document of a life that could have yielded a dozen memoirs.

  EUGENE MAGAZINE

  The Chronology of Water is the kind of book that makes you want to hug it to your heart, kiss its cover, run your fingertips over the edge of each page …Yuknavitch has this uncanny ability of making me feel like she’s reaching out of the book and past my skin and into my ribcage and then there’s her fist around my heart, synchronizing my pulse with the pace of her prose …The Chronology of Water is a vital book – a book that will be, as Kafka famously demanded, the axe for the frozen sea within you.

  PANK MAGAZINE

  Lidia Yuknavitch is an inspiring woman. Her story brought me to tears several times. The abuse she survived, ingested, and spit out in order to transform herself into the swan that she is today…was indeed a life-changing upbringing. Her story is haunting, touching, and heartbreaking.

  THE NERVOUS BREAKDOWN

  The most compelling thing about this story is not its raw palpability, but rather the pure hope and unabashed joy infused in its last chapters. Chronology is about the resiliency of the human heart and its ability to piece itself back together, over and over.

  PORTLAND WOMAN MAGAZINE

  It’s rather a relief that this is not an addiction memoir or a book about too much sex, although there’s lots of great randy sex on these pages. The Chronology of Water is simply an unapologetic story about life.

  THE COLLAGIST

  Speaking of water … as its title suggests, Lidia Yuknavitch’s fierce new memoir, The Chronology of Water (blurbed by Shields, among several eminent authors) takes place entirely off-shore, metaphorically speaking. Nothing about her life has followed the map. Yuknavitch gives new, rich meaning to the by-now-familiar idea of a fluid sexuality.

  PASTE MAGAZINE

  I cannot fathom of a list of the ten best books of the year that does not include Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water … one of the most stunning books I’ve ever read and undoubtedly the best book I read in 2011.

  THE RUMPUS

  I’m not sure I’ve ever had such a powerful, complex reaction to a book. The Chronology of Water is astonishingly beautiful, and, as a writer, Yuknavitch is a force. Her writing hits you, hard. It rocks you. She knocked me over with passages so brilliant, so true, I had to reread them over and over until I could bear to let them go in order to move on to the next paragraph.

  POWELL’S BOOKS

  … brave and breathless memoir … vivid storytelling.

  LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

  This book is for every teen who ever got treated like something was wrong with them, when really they were opening the portal for all of us. I made this for you. Also, you are right. The adult world is a Fellini movie.

  Crisis as Content: An Introduction

  LEAVE IT TO LIDIA YUKNAVITCH TO TAKE US ALL TO THE next level.

  It wasn’t that many years ago that rich people could get gussied up, wearing pearls and silver-buckled shoes, coats trimmed in ermine, diamond tiaras and velvet gloves and thus attired trot through lunatic asylums to watch the resident nutcases masturbate and eat feces. Such a bother, for the rich sane people, all that trotting, I mean. Nowadays, we simply recline on the sofa at home, sipping from our goblets of pinot noir. True, we’re forced to peel our own jumbo shrimp, but that’s the worst of it. Otherwise, we ogle the usual line-up of basket cases: There’s the compulsive hoarder, buried in heaps of squalid garbage and poo-sodden adult diapers. There’s the staggering, puke-glazed drunk or pill popper. There’s the always-entertaining sexual compulsive – that constantly jerking off, pussy paddling freak show. And there’
s the obese food-gobbling blimp.