At first, Toad would not seem to have much in common with its flashy older sister. Geek Love is razzle-dazzle. It’s a fan-dance book, a sequined-garter book, a honky-tonk-piano, platinum-blonde-biting-the-head-off-a-chicken type of book, that you could use as an inspiration for a burlesque act, and which, in fact, several women did.* Toad, meanwhile, is based in Katherine Dunn’s life—its pyrotechnic prose all in service of the shit and grit of lived experience.

Katherine Dunn was born in 1945, in Garden City, Kansas. Her father ran off when she was two. Working as itinerant fruit pickers, her mother and stepfather took her west, until at last they settled in Tigard, a small town near Portland. In 2021, it seems like most famous American authors are vat-bred in pricey MFA programs, but Dunn had the sort of background so often appropriated by artists looking for cred. She grew up broke. According to an obituary published by Reed Magazine, “Katherine would joke she didn’t have money for booze or drugs as a young person, so she would float in Tigard’s Fanno Creek like Ophelia, hoping to catch a bug that would give her a high.” Her mother beat her with any object at hand, and once threw a screwdriver at her so hard it punctured her calf. At age seventeen, she left the family home forever. In Missouri, she was arrested for passing a bad check and served a brief sentence in the Jackson County Jail; the jail cell horrors formed the basis of her first novel, Attic.

Like fellow Portland poor girl Sally Gunnar, Katherine Dunn was obsessed with the city’s prestigious Reed College; it is the main backdrop for the first part of Toad. After her time in jail, Dunn returned to Portland, where she made her living hustling pool. Like Sally, Dunn cadged food in the Reed cafeteria and stowed away to sleep in the Reed dormitory stairwells. Dunn got a full scholarship to Reed in 1965. Unlike Dunn, Sally is not a student; she merely waits tables, while failing to write a play. “I would not be young again, not a day younger,” she knows. This writer feels her reproach.