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Dora: A Headcase is a contemporary coming-of-age story based on Freud's famous case study--retold and revamped through Dora's point of view, with shotgun blasts of dark humor and sexual play. Ida needs a shrink . . . or so her philandering father thinks, and he sends her to a Seattle psychiatrist. Immediately wise to the head games of her new shrink, whom she nicknames Siggy, Ida begins a coming-of-age journey. At the beginning of her therapy, Ida, whose alter ego is Dora, and her small posse of pals engage in "art attacks." Ida's in love with her friend Obsidian, but when she gets close to intimacy, she faints or loses her voice. Ida and her friends hatch a plan to secretly film Siggy and make an experimental art film. But something goes wrong at a crucial moment--at a nearby hospital Ida finds her father suffering a heart attack. While Ida loses her voice, a rough cut of her experimental film has gone viral, and unethical media agents are hunting her down. A chase ensues in which everyone wants what Ida has.… (more)
User reviews
This one was a disappointment. The first several pages of the book (before the title page or text itself) are comprised of all the (deserved!) accolades she received for her memoir,
I am not familiar with Freud's original Dora case study so the allegory was lost on me, which just left a pile of incredibly unlikeable, ridiculously hyperbolic characters. Ida/Dora is fierce and angry, and has a lot of good reasons to be angry, but ... there was something off here. The book starts strong and ends very weakly, with coincidences making the plot advancement a little too conveniently tidy.