Dora: A Headcase, Lidia Yuknavitch's first novel (after the memoir The Chronology of Water), is an inside-out retelling of Sigmund Freud's classic case study of "Dora," a Viennese teenager he diagnosed with hysteria. Yuknavitch transposes the patient to modern-day Seattle and outfits her with a shaved head, plaid miniskirt and a crew of badass, misfit friends. "You know what? Seventeen is no place to be," declares Ida, our modern-day Dora. She acts out. She gets high. Like the first Dora, intense emotions make her faint or lose her voice.
So Ida's parents send her to Seattle's top psychotherapist: Dr. Freud, whom Ida calls Sig. She has no patience for his brand of analysis: "Hello, won't you come in and let me explore your genitals by pretending to talk about your family origins," she scoffs. "What a load of crap." Ida's first line of defense against Sig's probing is her wit, but she's also got a millennial's flair for technology--and an audio recorder stashed in her repurposed Dora the Explorer purse.
Ida and her friends (including Obsidian, a gorgeous Native American girl whom Ida is in love with) are hyper-modern, overstimulated and misunderstood. "We live through sound and light--through our technologies," she explains. "With our parents' zombie life dope arsenal at our fingertips."
We know the original Dora (whose real name was Ida) only through Freud's analysis of her feelings and dreams. In Dora: A Headcase, Yuknavitch grants a perspective and a voice to the girl who lost both. --Hannah Calkins, blogger at Unpunished Vice