Shipping May 6th: 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, who she nicknames Siggy and Sig, 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 -- Little Teena, Ave Maria, and
Obsidian -- engage in what they call "art attacks" for teen fun and
mayhem. Ida has a secret: she is in love with Obsidian. What's more, the
closer she gets to intimacy or the crisis of deep emotions, Ida faints
or loses her voice. Ida and her friends hatch a plan to secretly record
and film Siggy and Ida intends to make an experimental art film in which
he figures. Sig becomes the target of her teen rage and angst, but
something goes terribly wrong at a crucial moment of filming Siggy at a
nearby hospital when Ida finds her father in the emergency room having
suffered an acute heart attack. Ida loses her voice and experiences more
trauma -- a rough cut of her experimental film has gone underground
viral and unethical media agents are trying to hunt her down to buy the
material. A chase ensues in which everyone wants what Ida's got.
Dora: A Head Case 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. It's a
ballsy book. Some have called it the female Fight Club.
We're hosting a dinner with Monica Drake and Lidia Yuknavitch on May 5th. Tickets are available exclusively through our Kickstarter project.