In interviews, Dunn emphasized the joy she experienced as a child. According to Nick, the family was so poor that they once ate their pet rabbit for dinner. Until they settled down in Tigard, Oregon, when Dunn was around twelve, the family moved around the Western United States, sometimes working stints as tenant farmers. She grew up with an older brother, Spike, and a younger brother, Nick. Dunn, who was born in 1945 in Garden City, Kansas, was raised by Velma and her third husband, George Rossich, who supported the family on his salary as an Air Force officer and by running service stations and working as a mechanic. Dunn was her mother’s fourth child, but the only one from her second husband, Jack Russell Dunn, about whom little is known. Velma was a talented but frustrated artist who often didn’t have enough money for supplies so used household items for her work she once drew a portrait of Albert Schweitzer on a bedsheet with charcoal, which, as Dunn told it, came from the fireplace. Dunn then reëvaluated her approach to writing a novel.ĭunn’s childhood was notable for its poverty, its itineracy, and the influence of her larger-than-life mother, Velma Rossich, née Golly. She rewrote and submitted the novel to publishers for the next eight or nine years, but couldn’t get it published. Harper & Row bought the third book, “ Toad,” on spec just after the first two were published, but they later rejected it. Two of the books-“ Attic” and “ Truck”-were published in 19 by Harper & Row, before she turned twenty-six. The book was so resonant for Gilliam that as recently as 2010 he was still trying to adapt the novel, this time as a West End stage play.īefore she wrote “Geek Love,” Dunn had written three realistic novels, all of them based on events from her life.
According to Gilliam, Johnny Depp wanted to play the book’s most interesting character, Arturo the Aqua Boy, so badly that he tried to get Gilliam to make “Geek Love” into a movie-Tim Burton ended up buying the rights. Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love, Flea, and the Monty Pythonite Terry Gilliam were all outspoken fans. “Geek Love” is historically beloved by dark and eccentric artists, many of whom are famous. The book is about what happens after the circus impresario Aloysius Binewski feeds “cocaine, amphetamines, and arsenic” to his repeatedly pregnant wife, a retired geek named Crystal Lil, to genetically engineer a family of circus freaks. When Katherine Dunn’s novel “ Geek Love” became Sonny Mehta’s first purchase as editor-in-chief at Knopf, she became famous in the literary world, at the age of forty-three, after years of obscurity.
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