A Headcase: Dora
A Headcase
Lidia Yuknavitch & Chuck Palahniuk
On Sale: 08/07/2012 | $16.95
9780983477570 | Paperback 5-1/2 x 9 | 234 pages
Book Description
FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER
The female Fight Club: With shotgun blasts of playful dark humor, this ballsy coming-of-age story is based on Freud’s famous case study, but retold and revamped through our young protagonist’s point of view
Ida needs a shrink; or so her philandering father thinks, and he sends her to a Seattle psychiatrist. Immediately wise to the head games of her new therapist, who she nicknames Siggy or Sig, Ida begins a coming-of-age journey. At the beginning of her therapy, Ida, whose alter ego is Dora, and her small posse of pals—Little Teena, Ave Maria, and Obsidian-engage in what they call “art attacks” for teen fun and mayhem.
But Ida has a secret: she is in love with Obsidian. What’s more, whenever she gets close to intimacy or a crisis of deep emotions, Ida faints or loses her voice. Ida and her friends hatch a plan to secretly record and film Siggy, and Ida intends to make an experimental art film as a tribute. As Sig becomes the target of her teen rage and angst, something goes terribly wrong at a crucial moment—Ida’s father suffers an acute heart attack. Her voice lost, a rough cut of her experimental film goes underground viral and unethical media agents are trying to hunt her down to buy the material. Suddenly, everyone wants what Ida’s got—but she’s not willing to give it up so easily.
Praise For This Book
"Hold a basketball under water, 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 l like Ida before." —Blake Nelson, author of Girl and Paranoid Park
