About the Author

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

Reviews

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 * *

Yuknavitch has exhibited a rare gift for writing that concedes little in its quest to be authentic, meaningful and relevant
* * 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*

Dora is unlike any girl you'd ever dare to dream up, and Yuknavitch's full-bodied style of narrative, wrought with twisted grammar and jarring language, is disordered, unapologetic, and the only thing that could bring her to life . . . Yuknavitch has steered a new giant onto a literary genre's roster of teen anti-heroes, and created ten new meanings to the word "bad-ass"
*Electric Literature*

[An] audacious first novel . . . Yuknavitch nails the whip-smart angst of a teenage girl trapped in a world both familiar and unique, and her ease with language makes her a prose stylist to envy
* * Publishers Weekly * *

There's no reason for a novel to exist unless it's dangerous, provocative and not like anything that's come before. Dora: A Headcase is that kind of novel. It's dirty, sexy, rude, smart, soulful, fresh and risky
*KAREN KARBO, author of HOW GEORGIA BECAME O'KEEFFE*

An irreverent portrait of a smart seventeen year old trying to survive. It channels Sigmund Freud and his young patient Dora and is both a hilarious critique and an oddly touching homage. With an unerring ear and a very keen eye, Lidia Yuknavitch casts a very special slant of light on our centuries and our lives
*CAROLE MASO author of DEFIANCE*

Snappy and fun. I can pretty much guarantee you haven't met a character quite l like Ida before
*BLAKE NELSON author of GIRL*