Dora: A Headcase
Lidia Yuknavitch
Available as Paperback, eBook
A contemporary coming-of-age story based on Freud’s famous case study from the internationally bestselling author of The Book of Joan. Introduced by Chuck Palahniuk
Ida has a secret: she is in love with her best friend. But any time she gets close to intimacy, Ida faints or loses her voice. She needs a shrink. Or so her philandering father thinks.
Immediately wise to the head games of her new shrink, Siggy, Ida – and alter-ego Dora – hatch a plan to secretly film him. But when the film goes viral, Ida finds herself targeted by unethical hackers.
Dora: A Headcase is a contemporary coming-of-age story based on Freud’s famous case study, retold and revamped through Dora’s point-of-view. Yuknavitch’s Dora is radical and unapologetic – you won’t have met a character quite like her before.
“In Dora: A Headcase, Lidia Yuknavitch gives voice to a Freud patient who famously couldn’t speak, and presents her as a radical everywoman … Yuknavitch possesses a great well of empathy for misfits and a great passion for radical art”
boston Globe
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“Yuknavitch has exhibited a rare gift for writing that concedes little in its quest to be authentic, meaningful and relevant”
Jeff Vandermeer
new York Times
“In Dora, [Yuknavitch] takes the most classic model of Thera-tainment, personal-crisis-as-content and she re-imagines it wonderfully reversed. The world of Dora is not just possible, it’s inevitable. It’s revenge as the ultimate therapy”
Chuck Palahniuk
“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
“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 … I’d like to think she wrote parts of this novel just for me, but so many readers will feel that way”
Monica Drake Author Of Clown Girl
Lidia Yuknavitch
Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of the novels The Book of Joan, The Small Backs of Children and Dora: A Headcase. Her highly acclaimed memoir, The Chronology of Water, was a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for Creative Non-fiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Awards’ Readers’ Choice. Her TED talk, ‘The Beauty of Being a Misfit’, has been watched over two million times. Lidia teaches in Oregon, where she lives with her husband and their son. She is a very good swimmer.
@LidiaYuknavitch | lidiayuknavitch.net