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 He also told me about Toad, his mother’s completed but unpublished novel (Harper and Row, the publisher of Attic and Truck, declined the novel, even after a round of revisions).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.

Despite how deeply I connected with Toad, I was unprepared for the isolation of editing the work of a deceased writer. Up to that point, for me, editing had always been a conversation, a pleasing tension between two people. When I prepared to make even the smallest edits to Toad, I found I could not; the writer wasn’t there. I held both ends of the rope, and the responsibility was stymying.

A deft procrastinator, I decided to read Geek Love yet again, in hopes that it might divine the way forward. In fact, the table of contents offered some advice. Geek Love’s chapters have brassy titles like “Popcorn Pimp” and “Blood, Stumps, and Other Changes.” Toad initially lacked uniform section breaks as well as demarcated chapters and parts, so I imposed chapter titles composed from the text. It felt like a small thing, but afterward the novel possessed a discernible architecture upon which I made subsequent changes.