She waited tables at diners and manned the taps at bars. She painted houses and wrapped candy on factory assembly lines. In 2016, it seems most famous American authors are vat-bred in MFA programs, but Dunn had the sort of actual blue-collar background so often appropriated by artists looking for cred. A photo of Dunn at 24 shows a lank-haired 60s beauty, complete with cigarette, Pucci print, and a mouth made to caress sarcasm like a sweet.

After an itinerant childhood, she studied philosophy and psychology at Reed College, travelled to the Greek isles, had a kid in Ireland, then moved back to Portland. She was born in 1945 in the Pacific Northwest her father abandoned the family when when she was two.

Hone that, because that's the thing with which you'll cut the world.' As my friend Clayton Cubitt wrote, the thing that's strange in you is 'sharp as diamond and jagged as a razor. They are real as fire, leagues above the weak, mockable, hypocritical Normal Folks. Not in that condescending, cutesy way, where 'all colors to make up the rainbow.' In Geek Love world, freaks might be heroes, or villains, but they live like giants. Some disability rights activists have criticized the novel for using disability as a metaphor, with the 'freakish' bodies of Oly, Arty, Iphy, and Elly standing in for deviance and social weirdness, but Geek Love is actually a celebration of difference. For jagged young horrors like me, Dunn's book was both a weapon and a home.

Dunn's creatures were gone, but the world had rearranged itself in the time I spent getting to know them, and now I could face it with some steel in my spine. I devoured Dunn's story about the circus's rise and fall (Blood! Death cults! Tightrope Walkers! Amputations!) and when the end finally hit, and my eyes rose back from the page to the world, I was choked up like a child. I read about their parents (Al and Cristal Lil, who dosed themselves on radioactive elixirs in a quest to breed a family of freaks), and their siblings (Machiavellian genius Arty, telekinetic Chick, and Oly, the humpbacked albino girl who is the book's wry and heartbroken narrator). They were lissome piano players, joined at the waist, the star acts in the Binewski Family Carnival. I learned the twins' names: Elly and Iphy. The night my friend explained her tattoo, I bought Geek Love, then read it, in that fever of identification that Dunn initiates all go through. Geek Love, Katherine Dunn's creation, crawled through my eyes and into my brain furrows, as it did for a generation of young people, and changed how we saw ourselves. Katherine Dunn's work, however, is so alive it bleeds. She died on Thursday evening, at 70, from complications of lung cancer. 'The twins from Geek Love,' my friend answered.

Geek love by katherine dunn