In Memory of the Freakmother: Interviews with Katherine Dunn
A sprinkling of conversations with the author of GEEK LOVE (1945-2016)
By Tom Blunt
I was still cutting my teeth as an freelancer in 2008 when I first reached out to Katherine Dunn. Having been hired to write a horror blog (which has since been erased from the internet) for the AMC channel, I learned that pitching to editors was all about the angle, and quickly realized that I could make a case for reaching out to pretty much anyone I admired, as long as they were willing to talk about horror movies.
Geek Love author Katherine Dunn was among those I was most excited to speak to, and the bite-sized interviews below were terribly formative for me, simply because Dunn reached back in such a friendly way. Her emails were personal, containing questions for me as well as thoughtful answers to anything I asked. And because I knew a bit about how her imagination worked — from reading her world-famous, morbidly intense 1989 novel about a murderous sideshow family determined to home-brew its own freak show — it was quite humbling that she’d taken the time to be this congenial.
Truthfully, I felt a bit like Clarice Starling trying to impress Hannibal Lecter, so that he might drop some clues I’d missed in my initial investigation of Geek Love. And who was I? Just a well scrubbed, hustling rube with a little taste.
Later, it occurred to me that Katherine had set an example for the kind of writer I hoped to become, completely unafraid of just being herself. She was at peace with her own weirdness, especially in the company of those who were clearly receiving her signal. She’d managed what so many lonely writers had not: she’d reached out, way out, and found millions of people reaching back. I think that feeling got in her bones and never bled away, the way it does in so many writers whose egos demand ever-greater heights.
“One last thing,” I wrote to her. “Do you have a photo I can use?” She sent back the following, and asked me to credit Carole Delogu.
Tom Blunt: The characters in Geek Love are certainly grotesques in the classical sense. Are there movie monsters that you feel surprising sympathy toward?
Katherine Dunn: Sure. I feel sympathy, and even empathy, for a lot of movie monsters. But that’s neither surprising nor unusual. Most of us probably recognize as much of ourselves in the monsters as we do in the victims or in the good guys fighting off the dread threat. That’s what makes a great monster. Maybe we believe more completely in our secret monster side than in our good guy side. We hope we’re good guys, but we know we’re monsters.
TB: What sort of movies used to scare you as a child — do you find they've held up well over time?
KD: I think I was four or so when I had to be carried kicking and screaming out of a Western because somebody was being dragged toward a blacksmith’s fire where he was either going to be branded or burnt. No idea what the film was.
Other than that I identified first with animals. I still can’t forgive Disney for what happened to Old Yeller.
My first official “horror” movie was Tarantula in 1955 when I was 10. It’s a classic parental betrayal reminiscent of Frankenstein and Hansel and Gretel (which is THE scariest fairy tale, by far). First they create you, then they try to get rid of you, then they bring in the air force with napalm. The poignancy of Tarantula was enhanced for me because I saw the flick with my little brother on Christmas Day in a tiny town in the Texas panhandle. When we staggered shaking and quaking out of the theater into the broad daylight, Santa Claus was sitting out front in a buckboard, handing out candy canes. I never want to see Tarantula again, but I’m extremely fond of Santa Claus.
TB: I've noticed that many younger readers have become obsessed with Geek Love and find it to be a powerful commentary on adolescence. Did you anticipate this?
KD: No. I loved writing the book but most of the time I couldn’t imagine anyone reading it. I figured I’d run off a few copies at Kinko’s and force them on my friends. My notion was to light a fuse in my brain and ride the blast as far as it would take me. And try not to be boring in the process.
The fact that some people have responded strongly to the book continues to amaze me. And please me.
TB: I read your defense of Mike Tyson after the Holyfield match. It seems that when a person becomes notoriously "monstrous," others quickly become reluctant to attribute his or her actions to logical or human motivations. Why do you think this is?
KD: It’s interesting, isn’t it? I suspect it goes back to the constant need to define ourselves by denying what we hope or wish we are not. And of course we define our enemy — whoever that may be at the moment — as all that other stuff. War propaganda works the same way. It’s always those other guys doing the torture and extermination, tossing the babies up and catching them on bayonets, and what not. Those other guys don’t have any respect for…decency…civil rights… human life… the Geneva Convention. They’re not like us. They’re different. They’re monsters.
Probably the ability and the need — to identify and brand the stranger, the mutant, the enemy — has ancient roots and is a crucial survival trait but, as usual, we humans get carried away. Moderation was never our forte.
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In 2011 I reached out to Katherine again, having switched over to a Penguin Random House site called “Word & Film” (also now erased). The emphasis there was on book-to-movie adaptations, so I was able to craft a diabolical array of new pitches that sort of fit, and sometimes I’d get the go-ahead.
Geek Love had almost been adapted on several occasions, so that was all the excuse I needed to reach out to Katherine again. But would she remember me?
“Of course I remember,” she replied to my email. “You were completely charming and spoiled me rotten.” Oh please, there’s no way the pleasure isn’t entirely mine. But we talked, and she gave me a few quotes about the possibility of an adaptation project, which had been on Tim Burton’s plate up till that time, and has since been sought after by the Wachowskis, and now languishes in the great “probably too risky” circle of Hollywood development hell.
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TB: How do you feel about the prospect of a Geek Love film adaptation?
KD: I hope it happens. It would extend and expand the life of the book. As you’ve said about other books, a lot more readers come to them because of film adaptations than through the normal literary streams. Some writers get snooty about what happens when their books are adapted to film, but I don’t feel that way. Film is a different art form with its own demands and its own riches. A screenwriter once told me that adapting a script from a novel is hard, “Like trying to cut a child’s suit out of a man’s overcoat.” That makes sense to me.
Plus, the process of reading is a home movie at its best. Each reader projects their own version of the experience inside their skull as they go along. It’s probably true that no two people read exactly the same book. A film adaptation is, I hope, the director’s version. A new creation.
I’ve been amazed to see how many incarnations and mutations Geek Love has sprouted. Visual artists, musicians, theater groups, costume parties, even sandwich names in cafes, have all done riffs on characters or incidents in the book. The book acts as a launch pad, or maybe a trampoline for other artists to do their own tricks. Gives me a kind of Granny thrill to see it.
And the bottom line is that, no matter how others interpret it, the book itself remains unchanged.
TB: Has there ever been a time when you thought it was definitely going to happen?
KD: No. Though the option was picked up many times before Warner Brothers acquired the rights, I’ve always been aware that many are called and few chosen.
In the early years I could see that casting might be a problem. The mere technical problems of depicting the characters could be daunting. But with CGI and other special effects it seems possible, though expensive.
TB: Do you have any hopes/fears about what a Geek Love film might be like?
KD: Every time a new director is rumored to be interested I try to imagine how they might treat it. But in any hands at all it could go in any direction. It could be the most gawdawful schlock or a masterpiece for the ages. Or anything in between. Not my machine. But I’d love to see someone give it a try.
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In these last emails, I made sure to mention the NYC variety show I’d been hosting. She’d been such a good sport, why squander a chance to maybe invite her onstage someday? I told Katherine that at a recent event, we’d been sharing excerpts from various First Ladies’ memoirs, from Eleanor Roosevelt to Laura Bush. “Is it a PTA reading group?” she asked, “Or a Critics Slam in a grunge house cellar? Whatever makes you read the First Ladies has to be wild. If I had the misfortune to live in the no-smoking zone that used to be the magnificent city of NY (sorry, some things are unforgivable) I would never miss one of your shows.”
Look, I realize this is just shameless flattery. I even knew it then! But coming from a famous author, who asked for nothing in return, it was also more encouragement than I’d gotten from almost anyone. It cost her so little to extend that support, even if we both knew she was unlikely to set foot in nicotine-starved NYC ever again.
If anything, she preferred to lure me out west, where she lived. Her last email to me concluded: “And Tom — when you're considering bike friendly alternatives, do keep Portland, OR in mind. I'll send you a piece I did for Smithsonian Mag. But if I'm ever again in NYC I'll take you up on your kind invitation.”
It might sound silly, but through all this it felt as if I’d made a friend. And when she passed away in 2016, I felt a particularly strange sense of loss — not of a person I’d known truly and deeply, but one whose mind had brushed gently against mine on its way somewhere else, wherever that turned out to be.
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