Dora: A Headcase by Lidia Yuknavitch (A Review by Dawn West)

I, and many other sensible folks, believe that women should have primary control over our own bodies and stories, and Lidia Yuknavitch, my spirit animal, is no exception. Yuknavitch’s Dora: A Headcase, her divine whore of a debut novel, is a modern retelling of Sigmund Freud’s most (in)famous case study, Dora: Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.

Ida Bauer, who Freud christened Dora, was sent to him upon her father’s insistence. Freud diagnosed her with hysteria. She abandoned treatment after eleven weeks, causing Freud to declare that his treatment was a failure. However, he still used his analysis of her to establish his now-well-known theories of transference and counter-transference, as well as several notions about infant sexuality and dream interpretation. Freud is our great psycho father, after all. In the case study, Dora repeatedly disagrees with Freud’s analyses, and their relationship is tense, to put it mildly. Basically, Freud was being a misogynist. He had a dismissive, agitated attitude toward his young female patient, who deserved far better care. His depiction of her led to a celebrity persona; she became the poster child for hysteria without uttering a public word.

All we know of the real Dora and her family is what Freud recorded; to his credit, at least he believed her when she reported that her father was having an affair and the mistress’s husband had made repeated sexual advances on her, which we would now call molestation and possibly attempted rape. Freud pathologized her disgust and terror; he said her reaction was hysterical. What fifteen year old girl WOULDN’T love having a middle-aged man’s hands and mouth on her without her consent, his predator breath getting on her neck, in her hair? Now, over a century later, Yuknavitch gives voice to her, placing Dora/Ida in the 21^st century, armed with a riot grrrl thirst to fuck shit up.

Yuknavitch’s Dora/Ida lives in Seattle with her mother and father, who are both neglectful shitshows in their own ways. Her mother is sinking in vodka and Xanax, getting “even more beige.” Her father is busy philandering with Mrs. K, who is the bringer of Mr. K, the predator. Dora is forced to invent a family and construct a means of surviving. She is alienated, condescended to, preyed upon, and neglected by all the adults around her, except for her friend and quasi-mother figure, Marlene, a dazzling Rwandan trans woman with exceptional fashion sense and her own fucked up herstory who tells Dora, “Someday, you will learn to laugh with your whole life.”

Dora’s band of merry pranksters includes Obsidian, the love of her teengirl life, a Native American girl who’s kept a shard of black glass tied to her neck since her stepfather raped her after brutally beating her mother. C’est la vie pour les filles.

She turns to me so she’s facing me and I can’t stand looking at her anymore. She closes her eyes and says, “Kiss me, Dora.” I try not to head butt her with the force of my face moving toward hers. I kiss her. I kiss her and kiss her. I try not to bite her lip. She tastes like vodkahoney.

Dora is not a clean and proper girl. I fucking love her; all pink rage and young love, gushing with teengirl language and subsuming herself in multimedia art. If you have a problem with the way smart-ass young girls talk, get over it or find another novel. There is no way this girl could be typical; she’s preeminent. She’s THE case study; the girl who walked out on Freud after eleven weeks.

When Yuknavitch’s Dora is sent to Freud, she is furious, creative, confused, obscene, and atypically erotic. Like the real Dora, she bucks against the phallic-obsessed psycho-sexual narrative Freud consistently imposes upon her. She comes right back at him, pointed question after question, intent upon fucking his shit up. This Dora makes me laugh and swoon and fear. I recently tweeted: reading Dora makes me want to get drunk on champagne and punch a bunch of conservatives while wearing an Anaïs Nin T-shirt. Her energy is contagious.

I’m normally a traditional girl when it comes to narrative, but Yuknavitch’s ordered chaos appeals to me, like surrealism always has. I love her subversive word revelry, her raunchy humor, and her primal focus on the corporeal, which are all things I’ve come to expect from her, after falling in brain-love with her memoir The Chronology of Water. In violence and despair, she serves raw heart and steel-toed boots. I particularly treasured Dora’s moments with her mother (especially their striking scene in the hotel, near the end), and Obsidian, and Marlene, and her epic club night with Carl Jung and his entourage of gorgeous androgynous teens.

She wasn’t always a melted face. My mother, I mean. She used to be wicked smart. Read all kinds of books. And she was a concert pianist. When they got with each other. Apparently. That’s why a baby grand lives with us in the condo. But I’ve never heard her play. When I was born she had some kind of breakdown. Then when I was ten she ate an entire bottle of sleeping pills. I remember watching my father slap her face trying to wake her up. I remember how she looked lying on the hardwood floor, her body in a little “s”shape. I remember going into the bathroom and eating toilet paper and crying.

Hawthorne Books had me at the author name, but even if I wasn’t familiar with Yuknavitch’s work, I would have picked up this novel based on the cover art alone. It’s exceptionally well done. I must agree with Vanessa Veselka, Dora: A Headcase is like a smart, fast queer chick Fight Club. I wish I could buy an epic mass of copies and stick a couple in every high school and university library in the country.

I could devote five hundred more words to Mrs. K and her “creamy white ass” with ease, or to Dora’s art attacks; primarily the experimental film that draws amoral media agents into her cloud of trouble. This novel is ripe for re-reading. Dora‘s central thesis still rings through my body like an alto voice from a set of headphones:

We got to bust ass to be good mirrors for her. But also for us. We gotta keep reflecting back to each other or else get caught in this pop money death culture’s gaze. We gotta make our own families and write our own sexualities our own selves. Story it.

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Dawn West reads, writes, and eats falafel in Ohio.