The Countercultural Fiction of Katherine Dunn

Before Katherine Dunn published her celebrated novel Geek Love in 1989, she was a struggling single parent in Portland, Ore., paying rent by serving hash browns, painting houses, and pouring beers at a biker bar, where she became adept at breaking up knife fights. If this lean time was a prelude of sorts, it also came after an important chapter in her life had ended: the wide-open years of the late 1960s and early ’70s, when Dunn had dropped out of Reed College to go vagabonding around the world. More an observer of the era’s revolutionary energies than a participant, she had also become a writer during this period, penning two slim, savage novels about recalcitrant misfits—Attic and Truck—that were snapped up by a publishing industry seeking voices who could speak for a generation of dropouts. But by the time Dunn had moved back to Portland, the era’s youth movements had largely dissipated, as had interest in her first literary efforts. Her relationship with her son’s father had ended around the same time that the new novel she was working on—set at a fictional version of Reed in the ’60s—was rejected by her publisher. In the late ’70s, the sum of these disappointments left Dunn living in a tiny studio apartment, where her young son slept in the closet. It was in these years that she started working on Geek Love.