“We can imagine that they—that amorphous systemic ‘they’—won’t know we’re equal until they know we’re dangerous. More important, we won’t know it either,” Dunn wrote in a 1995 Vogue essay on the return of the Bad Girl.* This is one of Dunn’s most dangerous suggestions. Conventional femininity may seem at first like an uncomfortable little dress, into which neither Sally nor Oly can cram their bodies, but in fact it is something worse—poisoned like Medea’s wedding gown, it will consume its wearer in the end.

Katherine Dunn dropped out of Reed College in 1967. She had fallen in love with a New York drifter named Dante Dapolonia, and campus life made her antsy. The two hit the road. After three years in Europe, Dunn returned to Portland, having given birth to a son, Eli, and written two novels. Attic and Truck came and went. Still poor, she ditched Dapolonia; his next notable achievement was a string of bank robberies in the early aughts. Now a single mother, she did what she needed to survive. She squeezed herself and her son into a tiny studio. She painted houses and wrapped candy on factory assembly lines and posed nude for life-drawing classes. She waited tables at a diner and manned the taps at a bar frequented by biker gangs. “She always handled herself well and without fear,” Eli said. “She took knives from men twice her size, stepped in between men bent on shedding blood, and never came home with a scratch. She was confident and fearless, and they respected her.” During this period she wrote Toad. It is many things, but it is above all a working-class woman’s story, through and through.

In 1989 Geek Love was a finalist for the National Book Award. For decades, Dunn wrote a celebrated boxing column for Portland’s PDXS, and even trained as a boxer. In 2009, a sixty-four-year-old Dunn fought off a purse snatcher thirty-nine years her junior. “It was a helter-skelter affair,” Dunn told Oregon Live. “Getting a tetanus shot, it made me feel young again.”*

From Ernest Hemingway to Szczepan Twardoch, writers have long been fans of boxing. Boxing destroys the mind-body duality, makes the physical world as present as a fist smashing into a nose. Katherine Dunn never avoided the body—its excretions, its filth and longing. She writes about shit and blood and pus. Her stories rip off scabs. They revel in the beauty of wounds. In Toad, Sally is undone because she refuses to stay in the place allotted to her by her ugliness, and instead allows herself to lust. “It was never the cold hot dogs that drove me, not the sight of the picturesque sands. It was the muscles of your thighs, the warmth of your armpits, the thump of your blood in my ear. It was flesh, not philosophy,” she says, to every object of her desire.