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“The monster story suggests that authors and readers necessarily participate in the desire to see all bodies as monsters-as meaningful symbols.” In the age of the Internet and social media, we are still wrestling with which aspects of our selves are public and which are private, forever in this fluid process of managing what our bodies say about ourselves. While we’d expect these characters to battle with their unusual physical forms, the truth ends up being much more complicated.

In Geek Love, Dunn makes statements not just about the characters’ private and public selves but about the way we see bodies in general. There is no anonymity for a hunchbacked albino dwarf her body is always giving people specific and uncomfortable ideas about who she is.

But also, as the novel’s narrator points out, being physically deformed is a very “public” way to live.

Much is made in Geek Love about the public nature of deformity the parents claim to have given their children a great gift by making them “freaks.” As the mother puts it, “What greater gift could you offer your children than an inherent ability to make a living just by being yourself?” In this case, the children’s deformities are blatantly put on display in the family’s circus.

We want to prove that we’re special, but at what cost? Perhaps it has to do with the timeless symbolic appeal of the “monster story.” In his essay “Narrative Performance in the Contemporary Monster Story,” Daniel Punday writes, “One of the most traditional ways that a writer can explore society through the body is by telling a monster story.” After all, monster stories reveal a society’s “tensions, inconsistencies, and gaps.” The “monsters” in Geek Love take pride in their deformities, but to a sometimes frightening, violent degree: One of the circus “freaks” even begins his own cult full of devotees who willingly mutilate themselves in order to be more like him in another storyline, a mysterious figure pays beautiful women to have disfiguring operations. In Geek Love, Dunn is making statements not just about the characters’ private and public selves but about the way we see bodies in general.