Lidia Yuknavitch - Dora - A Headcase

Sigmund Freud smoked about twenty cigars a day all his adult life. He developed malignant oral cancer, but hid it for years. He underwent nearly thirty surgeries. The rest is all just a story passed like gossip between doctors, but the story goes that a well-known fellow doctor assisted him in suicide. That he wanted to die inside imagination, inside the act of reading literature, that the last book he read was a novel by Balzac. That his doctor friend pumped him with enough morphine to drop a horse, until he died inside a lovely, dizzy, exquisite interpretation of a roman à clef.

I know what Sig would say. He’d say we live out classic family romances, and there’s no way around it. On the other hand, goddamn it, is everything in life really all that fucking oedipal?

Because if it is, you know, just shoot me.

RHONDA HUGHES REMAINS A LITERARY HEROINE TO ME for her bravery and integrity; no better collaboration between writer and editor/publisher exists. Anywhere. Here it is straight-no-chaser: this book would not exist without the help of the posse. So: Thank you Chuck Palahniuk for the idea about you know what and that other thing and especially the part that is going to creep out everyone but you and me. And for laughing. Thank you Monica Drake for already being as nerd-girl obsessed with Dora and Freud as I was. Thank you Chelsea Cain for liking Ave Maria — parts of her I made pretending you and me grew up best friends. And for the title. Thank you Suzy Vitello for “getting” the psychology stuff and the Gemini stuff and forgiving me for being the daughter I probably was and liking me anyway. Thank you Erin Leonard for writing weird things that make the weird things I write seem less foreign. Thank you Cheryl Strayed for loving those mother and father pages we both know I made up from a deep wishful place. Thank you Diana Page Jordan for understanding how big a deal it is to survive and then tell about it through stories. Thank you Mary Wysong-Haeri for the secrets we passed back and forth and the sneaker wine dates. And thank you to the Mingo, who read every damn word, every page, and told me how to better kick ass before I brought them to the posse. All quotes from Sigmund Freud from Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (Touchstone, 1997).