Who does Katherine end up with in the books?

When Katherine Dunn’s novel “Geek Love” became Sonny Mehta’s first purchase as editor-in-chief at Knopf, she became famous in the literary world, at the age of forty-three, after years of obscurity. The book is about what happens after the circus impresario Aloysius Binewski feeds “cocaine, amphetamines, and arsenic” to his repeatedly pregnant wife, a retired geek named Crystal Lil, to genetically engineer a family of circus freaks. “Geek Love” is historically beloved by dark and eccentric artists, many of whom are famous. Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love, Flea, and the Monty Pythonite Terry Gilliam were all outspoken fans. According to Gilliam, Johnny Depp wanted to play the book’s most interesting character, Arturo the Aqua Boy, so badly that he tried to get Gilliam to make “Geek Love” into a movie—Tim Burton ended up buying the rights. The book was so resonant for Gilliam that as recently as 2010 he was still trying to adapt the novel, this time as a West End stage play.

Before she wrote “Geek Love,” Dunn had written three realistic novels, all of them based on events from her life. Two of the books—“Attic” and “Truck”—were published in 1970 and 1971 by Harper & Row, before she turned twenty-six. Harper & Row bought the third book, “Toad,” on spec just after the first two were published, but they later rejected it. She rewrote and submitted the novel to publishers for the next eight or nine years, but couldn’t get it published. Dunn then reëvaluated her approach to writing a novel.

Dunn’s childhood was notable for its poverty, its itineracy, and the influence of her larger-than-life mother, Velma Rossich, née Golly. Velma was a talented but frustrated artist who often didn’t have enough money for supplies so used household items for her work; she once drew a portrait of Albert Schweitzer on a bedsheet with charcoal, which, as Dunn told it, came from the fireplace. Dunn was her mother’s fourth child, but the only one from her second husband, Jack Russell Dunn, about whom little is known. Dunn, who was born in 1945 in Garden City, Kansas, was raised by Velma and her third husband, George Rossich, who supported the family on his salary as an Air Force officer and by running service stations and working as a mechanic. She grew up with an older brother, Spike, and a younger brother, Nick. Until they settled down in Tigard, Oregon, when Dunn was around twelve, the family moved around the Western United States, sometimes working stints as tenant farmers. According to Nick, the family was so poor that they once ate their pet rabbit for dinner.

In interviews, Dunn emphasized the joy she experienced as a child. “It was never boring. My mother could make pie out of two Saltines and a raisin, and she often did.” But the stories she used to tell friends, and her son, Eli Dapolonia, were wilder. She told Eli that her mother tried to kill her at least three times. She used to tell her friend, the novelist Todd Grimson, that Velma once fired a pistol through the ceiling while Katherine and her brothers were hiding upstairs. According to Nick, some of these stories were tall tales. “I don’t think my mother ever owned a gun,” he told me. As he saw it, Velma exerted an obsessive control over Katherine. “Anything my sister would try to do to announce that she was going to have her own life was unallowable, that’s just not heard of.”

Dunn found escape through writing. Her first published work was a poem that she wrote in high school, “I’m Petrified,” in which she cleverly equated the extinction of the dinosaurs with the then-contemporary fear of the atomic bomb. Her English teacher introduced Dunn to Thoreau’s “Walden,” from which she later said that she learned “the concept that if you examine anything closely you will see all of the forces of the universe at work.” As a student at Reed College, Dunn found a kindred spirit in her poetry professor, Galway Kinnell, the first writer who could serve as a plausible role model—like Dunn, Kinnell had escaped working-class roots to study at an élite college. At Reed, Dunn began work on “Attic,” her first novel, a fictionalization of a stint in a Kansas City jailhouse when she was eighteen and was arrested for trying to cash a fraudulent check.

In “Attic,” Dunn introduced an early version of the sinister magic realism she would later make famous in “Geek Love.” The book’s narrator, K. Dunn, describes a carrousel in which, to gain entry, young boys have to shoot arrows into their mothers’ vaginas and young girls have to throw hoops over their father’s erections. “If they don’t make it in four tries they can’t ride the merry-go-round so the Mommies spread their legs wider and wider and the Daddies sweat to rub up a good one.” But the book is largely a realist work in which Dunn emphasizes the trauma of her protagonist’s childhood. “Attic” is filled with potent flashbacks about K. Dunn’s mother shaming her, like this one: “. . . she looked at me very closely there and said you’ve been playing with yourself again haven’t you . . . and she said show me show me how you do it and I just lay there and she got angry and she said if a bitch dog did that they’d have to kill her . . . and I couldn’t help it I started to cry . . .” K. Dunn experiences some liberation in prison, where no one cares if she masturbates, but is thrust back into shame after she agrees to pleasure a male benefactor who helps get her out. Some of the book’s best parts read like a neurotic’s guide to prison life, in which Dunn uses what she learned from Thoreau to describe the vagaries of sharing a toilet with a cellmate. “I could piss over her piss but I can’t piss over her shit, much less shit over it and have them mix. It would be terrible if mine came out lighter or darker than hers—you could tell whose they were. Even worse if they were the same.”

In a review of the book published in a 1971 issue of the now defunct Reed College journal Sallyport, Dunn’s former professor Kaspar Locher astutely noted that “the most moving aspect of this strange and often frightening book is that behind all the cruelty and ugliness which fill its pages there lies—not cynicism—but a quiet and unobtrusive compassion with man, this funny forked animal.” The divide, which would later be echoed in the reception for each of Dunn’s novels, was between critics who, like Locher, valued the truth-seeking impulse behind her writing, and those who found her embrace of the grotesque to be gratuitous. John Leonard wrote in his review for the Times, “Miss Dunn will have to get by on language, which she manipulates superbly, instead of plot which she mutilates with cruel gleefulness. But she does get by.” Judy Bolch, a reviewer for the News & Observer, had a different take, snidely calling “Attic” out for being tacky and vulgar by comparing the book to Limburger cheese: “It is undeniably strong, loud-smelling and vivid. Some people think those qualities are enough. Others demand at least a little good taste.”

“Truck,” published a year after her début, is more about liberation than shame, and, as a result, it’s a lot more fun to read. The book’s protagonist, Dutch Gillis, is a fifteen-year-old grifter on the hunt for adventure. About Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” she says, “It was all right except I couldn’t understand the punishment part. How come he felt bad?” Dunn fictionalizes her experience, as a teen-ager, of running away from home to meet her high-school friend, Heydorf, in Los Angeles. Even though Heydorf, as a character in the book, is physically repulsive, obnoxious, and belittling, Dutch longs to connect with him in any way she can. Here, Dunn uses the principle she learned from Thoreau again—this time to advance the plot. There’s a description of her attempting intimacy by rubbing Vicks VapoRub on Heydorf’s pimply back that, depicted through Dunn’s steadfast gaze, manages to be poignant, hideous, and sublime, all at the same time. “I slop on more Vicks and smear it around and the zits prickle sharp against my fingers. I don’t rub hard. They might break and run on my hands.” Dutch knows that people think that she looks like a pot-bellied boy—“How come your belly’s so big?” Heydorf asks her—but she chokes back the sting of it. She just wants experience. A reviewer in the Briefly Noted section of this magazine noted, “The book dwells constantly on muck of all kinds, but Miss Dunn seems to enjoy messing in it.”

Dunn intended these first novels to be the beginning of a six-part series; when taken together, the first letter of each title would spell “Attila.” “I was reading a lot of European history and I thought Attila the Hun had gotten a bad rap,” she told the Oregonian in 2009. Dunn devised the cosmic joke for some future librarian to discover and appreciate. She chose the books’ titles essentially at random—there is no significant mention of an attic or a truck in either book. Dunn insisted “Attic” was thusly named because she wrote it in one.

The third novel in the attempted series—the second “T” in “Attila”—is “Toad,” which was posthumously published last month by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. “Toad” is the story of Sally Gunnar, a thirty-six-year-old hermit who is self-loathing and remorseful, in part because she’s self-consciously overweight and alone. The structure of “Toad” is more complex than that of her first two novels. Dunn alternates a front story, in which Sally reflects on her life, with a back story, wherein her good friend Sam Rosen, who wants to be a philosopher but can’t settle on which Eastern philosophy to follow, shacks up with a New Agey girlfriend, Carlotta, and the two lose their infant son as they try to live off the grid in the mountains.

The book is quiet—Sally is reading Proust as she contemplates her past—but there are moments of acute emotional violence, as Dunn returns to the theme of shame. One scene, when college-aged Sally humiliates a romantic rival, is particularly bracing. “Why is it that your odd, slimy romp is always initiated with a knock at the door of your room in the middle of the night?” Sally asks.

At the book’s core is Sally’s disapproval of Sam and Carlotta, both children of privilege, whose carelessness makes the working-class narrator bristle. Dunn once again uses unflinching descriptions of the corporeal to great effect as she describes the cracked and sagging teats of a goat that, because of Sam and Carlotta’s shoddy care, has become sick. “Long, gaudy fissures in the strange flesh. A thin fluid seeped from them, shiny in the sunlight.”

Like Dunn’s earlier protagonists, Sally is characterized by loneliness and a complicated relationship to her own body. Reflecting on a brief period when she was thin, Sally tells us, “To meet the eyes of strangers and find them holding no laughter or disgust—amazing. It was not a sense of beauty that thrilled me so; I was not beautiful. It was the simple fact of no longer being grotesque, of being at least inconspicuous in my ugliness.”

Harper & Row gave Dunn half of a fifty-five-hundred-dollar advance for “Toad” back in 1971, but then asked for a revision that they ultimately rejected. Her agent Jay Garon, a former character actor and Broadway producer who would make his name in 1987 by discovering three chapters of John Grisham’s first novel in the slush pile, continued sending “Toad” out until 1976, when she fired him. Dunn continued submitting the book to publishers on her own for several more years, but no one was buying.

In 1977, Dunn was living in a four-hundred-square-foot studio in Northwest Portland where her son, Eli Dapolonia, slept in the closet. She worked mornings waiting tables at the Stepping Stone Café and nights tending bar at the Earth Tavern, where she became known for her effective, if flamboyant, approach to breaking up fights: she would jump onto the aggressor’s back and hold on until he relented. When Dunn’s colleague admired her bravery, she shrugged and explained that it was no big deal. “I used to work at a strip joint,” she said.

At the Earth Tavern, Dunn became friends with the doorman, Tom Cassidy, the co-creator of the Impossibilists, an anarchistic performance-poetry group of Portland’s underground art scene. Without Cassidy, there would be no “Geek Love.” Dunn fell under the spell of the Impossibilists’ absurdist aesthetic as she began writing poetry in the group’s style, which privileged sound over meaning, publishing her work in their journal and joining their raucous performances, in which poets sometimes stripped naked. Cassidy also taught Dunn about circus life—his brother, Bob, was a well-known mentalist and magician as well as the author of several books about mind reading. “Katherine was really dazzled by Bob,” Cassidy explained. “He’d show up and you’d sit down and he would just do things that cannot be done.”

Dunn was excited to hear Cassidy’s stories about a famous circus freak, Lobster Boy, who he had seen perform at the county fair in New Jersey when he was a kid. Lobster Boy and his father were both born with legs that stopped at the knee and claw-like pincers instead of hands. They started their own travelling freak show, the Lobster Family. “What greater gift could you offer your children than an inherent ability to earn a living just by being themselves?” asks Crystal Lil in “Geek Love.” For better or for worse, Lobster Boy’s dad had given his son just this gift.

This was a wild and exploratory time for Dunn, who had become a local celebrity from her poetry and fiction readings around town. But her fiction had stalled out, and she was still working to get “Toad” published. Dunn had been calling Michael Denneny, an editor at St. Martin’s Press, trying to persuade him to read her manuscript, which he’d had for close to a year. In May of 1979, Denneny politely but firmly rejected “Toad,” explaining that it had been a close call. “The stumbling block is that after one finishes reading the novel, one can still say ‘So what?’ ” wrote Denneny. “Another well written, somewhat autobiographical novel—what difference does it make?”

This note was likely somewhere in Dunn’s consciousness on a sunny day, a few weeks later, when she tried to get Eli to go for a walk with her. Eli refused; he wasn’t in the mood. Dunn went anyway, up to Portland’s International Rose Test Garden, where, inspired by the genetically engineered flowers and their extraordinary patterns, she realized she could’ve perhaps designed “a more obedient son.” As she explained to Wired magazine, in 2014, Dunn then had a second thought. “It would be more interesting to go in another direction entirely, to search for something other than the perceived symmetrical, common notion of perfection. Which got me thinking about freaks and mutations that were not considered desirable.”

This was the day Dunn conceived of her magnum opus. In “Geek Love,” rather than dramatize her characters’ trauma and self-loathing, she would create a family of characters who view their abnormalities and outsider status as evidence of their superiority to “norms.”

Dunn used to say that the “Geek Love” character she related to most was the novel’s narrator Olympia Binewski, an albino, hunchback dwarf who is tortured by being in love with her older brother, Arturo, who will never love her back in that way. Olympia, whose freakishness isn’t extraordinary enough to draw crowds, works as a carnival barker, trying to get fans into the tents of Arturo and her conjoined twin sisters, Electra and Iphigenia. Olympia has much in common with Dunn’s other protagonists. She’s keenly observant, not conventionally attractive, and filled with longing. Like the others, she also has bad taste in men.

Dunn’s most fascinating creation, however, is Arturo the Aqua Boy, the eldest Binewski sibling, who was born with flippers instead of arms and legs. He’s scornful of norms and proud of his physique. Arturo may not be able to walk or easily feed himself, but, through charisma and stagecraft, he draws legions of admirers. Through Arty, Dunn explores the inverse of shame; he’s a dangerous megalomaniac. Arty creates a cult, Arturism, and persuades his followers to have their digits and extremities amputated, one by one, so that, like their leader, they can liberate themselves from accepted ideals of normalcy and beauty. “You feel ugly, don’t you, sweetheart?” he asks a forlorn and overweight devotee as he swims in his giant aquarium. “If I had arms and legs and hair like everybody else, do you think I’d be happy? NO! I would not! Because then I’d worry did somebody love me! I’d have to look outside myself to find out what to think of myself!”

The meaning of the book’s title is not immediately apparent. It’s about love between geeks. And the love the geeks share is freakish: they love each other because of each other’s strangeness, not in spite of it. And the parents don’t reject their children’s strangeness—they intentionally designed them that way! The more extravagant the Binewski offspring’s genetic divergences, the more their parents love them. The book is filled with near-incest—Olympia has her younger brother Fortunato use his telekinesis to extract Arturo’s sperm and impregnate her with it. But Dunn never pathologizes or disapproves of the desire the siblings have for one another, so neither does the reader. Even when their love drives them to do horrible things.

In the novel’s present-tense story line, which takes place about twenty years after the rise and fall of the family’s show, Binewski’s Carnival Fabulon, Olympia covertly watches over her and Arty’s daughter, Miranda, whose only trace of geekness is a small tail that excites patrons when she dances at the local fetish strip club. Miranda is a painter. Her talent attracts the attention of Miss Lick, a wealthy, domineering heiress who spends her fortune paying young women to desexualize themselves so they can focus on higher pursuits. Lick offers to pay Miranda if she agrees to cut off her tail. To protect her daughter, Olympia kills Miss Lick, and dies in the process. She informs Miranda who she is with a posthumously delivered letter, encouraging her to embrace her Binewski heritage.

In an afterword to a paperback edition of “Geek Love,” Dunn appeared to refer to “Toad” as a “dreadful novel.” In private, she said that it was a book about “some rich kids who don’t know what the hell they’re doing.” But she was hard on herself, and hard on the work. In the same afterword, she wrote, “So, though I’m a slow learner, maybe I’ll have life enough yet to write something that will punch out through time, and sit dustifying on some shelf waiting to talk to far-off generations.” Of course, she had already written that book—three decades after its first publication, “Geek Love” continues to sell thousands of copies each year.

For nearly thirty years at the end of her life, Dunn worked on a follow-up novel, “Cut Man.” “It deals with two human mysteries that intrigue and haunt me—serial murder and boxing,” she wrote in a proposal to Sonny Mehta around early 1989. But, even though she was no longer tethered to autobiography and realism, Dunn couldn’t find a dramatic engine powerful enough to drive the novel’s plot. The draft that I read, dated 2014, is the quiet, often beautiful but incomplete story of a boxing cornerman, Leo Reese, who spends nights taking care of the children of working prostitutes—running a night care—and, as Dunn describes, sometimes dresses up in women’s clothing to embody the strength and beauty of his wife, who died years earlier in a car accident.

After “Geek Love,” Dunn published a fair amount of journalism—about boxing, about her feminist idea that women should recognize their own capacity for violence—but her most significant piece of writing from this period was a lecture she gave called “On Cussing,” which was published as a book by Tin House in 2019. Dunn offers wonderful tips in the essay, which is both a primer on and a history of using curse words as a fiction writer. “It’s always satisfying to cast aspersions on one’s enemy’s parentage,” she writes. She also generates new and original ways to insult and offend, like, “I hope your ears turn into assholes and shit all over your shoulders.”

The essay sheds light on Dunn’s work and her mission as a fiction writer, as she, referring to the work of the historian Melissa Mohr, traces the use of cuss words in order to transgress boundaries back to an increased sense of privacy in sixteenth-century England, when the growing popularity of the fireplace allowed people to have private bathrooms and bedrooms, rather than sleeping all in the same room and using the toilet in front of one another. Certain acts were no longer to be done in public, or even to be mentioned. Dunn writes that, because of this shift, curse words were absent from published English-language books for nearly a hundred and fifty years. “This period, from the early nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth centuries, represents the apex of bodily shame,” Dunn wrote. She goes on to note that the violence of the two World Wars diminished many of the era’s social conventions, including the banning of obscenities. “The great walls around euphemism really crumbled after WWII ended in 1945.” This was the very year that she was born. ♦

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