After her death from lung cancer in 2016, my interest in Dunn became insatiable. I read everything I could about her. I’d initially assumed Geek Love was her only book, the single pearl of a dark and brilliant imagination, but then I learned about Attic and Truck, the novels she published twenty years before Geek Love. I devoured them and still wanted more. In the online catalog of Dunn’s archive, at the Aubrey R. Watzek Library at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, where Dunn once taught creative writing, I found a list of several short stories I’d never read. Most of them were published in the 1990s in small, now-defunct journals, which explains why they’d eluded my initial search. Editions of these journals were nearly impossible to find online, so I wrote to the staff at Lewis & Clark College and crossed my fingers. Within a few days, I received an email from Zach Selley, the associate head of special collections at the Watzek Library. He sent me images of the original handwritten and typewritten pages. Reading them, I was reminded what it is like to sit in the magnetic field of Dunn’s imagination, to be jolted by her voice.

Zach introduced me to Eli Dapolonia, Dunn’s surviving son, who, at the time, still lived in Portland. We struck up a correspondence; he was generous with stories of his mother and patiently answered my questions. In September 2019, I flew to Portland to visit the archive in person. Eli and I met for breakfast at the Stepping Stone Café, where Dunn once waitressed. Over coffee and eggs, he told me about sitting at the chrome bar top after school while she finished her shifts. When I described the difficulty of locating her stories, he said it had been very important to his mother to see her work in small journals, even after the success of Geek Love. He also told me about Toad, his mother’s completed but unpublished novel (Harper and Row, the publisher of Attic and Truck, declined the novel, even after a round of revisions). He thought I might like to read it, too.

Sally Gunnar, the maligned and self-deprecatory central character of Toad, reminds me of myself in my twenties. She scuffs around in a pair of beat-up leather boots, smokes too much, spends a lot of time thinking about writing but never getting around to it. She toils at menial jobs and earns enough cash to make possible this lifestyle but not much else, which is fine by her—her desires are unconventional, if a little vague. When it all seems pointless, she sinks into her decaying pink velvet chaise (mine was green), the secondhand centerpiece of her shitty attic apartment, to drink purple soda, nurse her disappointments, and wait for something else to happen: “I lay there with the weight of unspecified darkness, contemplating suicide, and hoping for an interruption.” I knew Toad would be as meaningful to other readers, that it was a significant contribution to the history of women’s writing and feminist fiction.