Dora with a Freudian Slip

I thought nothing could touch Thrust, but Dora blew it out of the park. Lidia Yuknavitch does what very few writers can, she takes something already heavy with history and psychology and cracks it open in a way that feels urgent, modern and ferociously relevant. Her research rivals Christopher Moore’s devotion to detail and the uncanny precision of Freud’s analysis, reimagined, interrogated and reframed casts new light on both Freud himself and the raw interior lives of today’s youth.

Yuknavitch eases the reader straight into the heart of the story, following Ida, who becomes Dora, an artistic teen armed with cameras and an overfull inner world. From the first page, I was hooked. Every page is crammed with context that intrigues, boggles, baffles and inevitably saddens. Nothing is wasted. Nothing is easy. When Dora muses, “You know, in life? Whoever you’re gonna be, I think maybe the trick is to be it over the top,” it feels less like a line and more like a thesis for art, for survival, for becoming.

I won’t give the ending away. I’ll only say this, I was shocked by where it all went. This book stayed with me long after I closed it. It may be my favorite book of all time. I wish I had read it when I was fourteen, when it might have cracked something open in me earlier, when it might have named the unnamed and made it survivable. Dora doesn’t just tell a story. It makes you look back at your youth, raw, and recklaess and feel grateful that you made it out carrying anything at all.

The Freudian Slip

A cocktail for memory, desire and what leaks out anyway

This drink starts innocent and ends complicated. Just like youth. Just like Dora.

Ingredients

• 1½ oz gin (botanical, cerebral, quietly unruly)

• ½ oz absinthe or pastis (a whisper of the unconscious)

• 1 oz blood orange juice

• ½ oz pomegranate juice

• ½ oz fresh lemon juice

• ¼ oz simple syrup or honey syrup

• Ice

Garnish

• Expressed lemon peel

• Optional: a sugar cube soaked with absinthe, dropped in at the end

Instructions
Rinse a coupe or rocks glass with absinthe and set aside.
In a shaker filled with ice, add gin, blood orange juice, pomegranate juice, lemon juice, and syrup.
Shake until cold and slightly unhinged.
Strain into the absinthe-rinsed glass.
Express the lemon peel over the top and drop it in.

Notes
The absinthe lingers like a thought you weren’t ready to have.
The fruit keeps it young.
The bitterness shows up late—uninvited, but necessary.

Drink This When
You’re thinking about who you were, who you became, and what you repressed just to make it through.

Sometimes the truth slips out anyway.