'Geek Love' by Katherine Dunn ~ Sideshow Freak Reflects Back on Family

About two years ago I wrote an article describing some of my favorite books in six word sentences – a la flash fiction style.  You know, the way Ernest Hemingway did with the classic flash fiction story; “For sale, baby shoes, never used.” 

                Last week I was in Crested Butte, Colorado where I discovered a little bookstore called ‘Blue Moon Books’ which was attached to a coffee shop, although they are not one and the same as I learned once I wanted to get some coffee while I looked over a book that I thought I might purchase and the guy asked me if I was going to pay for the book – mea culpa.  It is moments like this that make or break your feelings for a particular bookstore, especially if they are independently owned.  Sure I could have been surly and turned on the sarcasm, but since the first book I saw when walking into the place was a copy of ‘Geek Love’ I decided right then and there to just buy the vampire novel in my hand. 

                You see, ‘Geek Love’ is a talisman of sorts for me.  It is one of those books that will decide immediately that I like someone if I find out that he or she has read it.  I have never heard anyone say they didn’t like it because it is pretty clear from the blurbs on the back cover that the topic is either going to appeal to you or not.  In other words you either like circus freaks and understand that for many of these folks the sideshow was not only a way to make a living, but was a way that people who would normally not fit into a community made one for themselves.  I don’t want to use the cliché that there are two types of people in the world…but there are two types of people in the world, those that like stories about freaks and those that don’t. 

                I first heard about this book in a review I read about it in none other than ‘People’ magazine.  I think I went out the next day and bought the book.  I wasn’t disappointed.  OMG, I just looked up the year it was published; I can’t believe the story is twenty years old!  The first time I read it I was working this high stressed job with a horrible supervisor; the type of person who literally told a coworker with breast cancer that she couldn’t understand why if she had Thursday off for chemo she would need Friday off as well.  I imagine hell will never be hot enough for her.  I would come home and then read this compelling weird book that didn’t brighten my mood but did seduce me with its storyline.  In fact I was reading it when a friend moved in with me after saying she wanted to know if it was okay to plunk down at my place with a toothbrush while she looked for work in K.C.  Of course I said yes because I’m a sharing sort of girl.  I really didn’t think that she was going to turn my dining room area of my one bedroom apartment into another bedroom complete with a canapé bed and a dresser and drawers made of cherry wood topped with at least seven framed Glamour Shots of herself.  I remember the day I walked into my place and saw this impromptu high-endish bedroom in what should have been my dining room if I could have afforded a dining room set, which I couldn’t, and I walked out again in a daze making sure that I walked into the right apartment.  When I spied ______ in all of her glamour best (there were pictures with feather boas and pictures without feather boas; pictures with cowgirl hats, pictures without cowgirl hats) I knew that my home life was probably going to be as nightmarish as my day job…and I was right, but the thing that kept me intrigued, besides wondering just why my then roomie thought I would want a framed 8 X 10 photo of her in soft focus for Christmas, was ‘Geek Love.’

I don’t know what happened to my original copy of ‘Geek Love’ so when I had a hankering to read it again I went to a bookstore in St. Joseph (where I’m originally from which may help explain my fascination with all things freakish).  The teen who tried to appear as if she had seen it all before because she was working at Hastings, the hippest place in Smoeville, said something to me about looking up ‘Geek Love’ in the nonfiction lovelorn section.  Not to cast aspersions on clueless teens who dress in black; but as a disenchanted book salesteen who had never heard of ‘Geek Love,’ she wasn’t not the quickest bic in the Goth clique.  I, with my long blonde hair and Kansas City aura, had to educate the lass with a major eye roll and exasperated explanation that ‘Geek Love’ was a novel and if she wasn’t in on it then, well, she would always have to live in a community with a population under 100,000. 

It was amazing to me the things I had forgotten when I had first read the book.  For instance, I remember that the narrator was a dwarf, but had completely forgotten that she was an albino hunchback dwarf.  One of my greatest joys in life is to meet some like-minded person and turn them on to ‘Geek Love.’  One of my friends was reading it by my recommendation while on some business trip with her husband to some Canadian city, which I might have been Toronto, when she saw a woman with two heads walking down the street.  Yes, two heads, one…two.  She reported that the woman was in a business suit and her parasitic twin was hanging to the side of her shoulder.  And to think some people don’t believe in fate!

I suppose that it is about that time again where I can pick up my latest copy of this book and read it.  I’m sure there will be elements that will remain just as they are frozen in my memory, and then there will be things that I have completely forgotten about.  I profess a belief that ‘Geek Love,’ if not now it will soon be, regarded as an American classic.  From what I have gathered Katherine Dunn hasn’t written any novels after ‘Geek Love’ which is a tragedy of sorts since both the plot and the writing are exquisite in her most well known book.  I suppose it doesn’t surprise anyone native to our part of the country that she was born in Kansas City, Kansas…the Dot has a lot of which to be proud.  Wyndotte County for those of you out of the know.

Westerfield © 2009