She must have been eleven. Before it stopped. Yuknavitch became a woman full of rage. She turned on herself, turned against her body, which had been made beautiful and powerful by water. She squandered a college swimming scholarship through drugs, alcohol, and sex with anything that moved. She punished herself over and over, for years, trying to root out the evil that abuse had buried in her. Writing became her salvation. Time and again, as she lurches from mistake to affair, from addiction and obsession, it is writing that buoys her above the waves of her own destructive seas.
Caution must be taken not to romanticize Yuknavitch's scary history. But if you can separate yourself from the literal and sink into the sheer beauty of her language, the way she wraps her arms around you and won't let you go, you will be rewarded with tears and laughter, with frustration and rage.
You will feel. And isn't that why we read? To feel, deeply, achingly, painfully, blissfully. The nature of memoir, as distinct from autobiography, is like looking down at your body in a pool of water: shapes are distorted, disjointed, appearing larger or smaller or not at all.
Memoir is not a chronological connection of facts. Memoir is a work of prose, it is an interpretation of one's life just as a painting is an interpretation of a scene or a theme. Whether or not every event described by Yuknavitch, or any other memoirist, really happened is not the point of memoir; the point is to offer the reader a powerful piece of writing with experiences that elevate the personal to the universal.
Yuknavitch says it best: All the events in my life swim in and out between each other. Without chronology. Like in dreams. So if I am thinking of a memory Language is a metaphor for experience. It's as arbitrary as the mass of chaotic images we call memory-but we can put it into lines to narrativize over fear. This isn't for everyone. Some will read and be exasperated or disgusted or disbelieving. I get that. I get that chaos and promiscuity and addiction are ugly, messy, and life is too short to waste reading about someone else's tragedy and self-destructive behavior.
That's pretty much me, really. But something about this story--the goddamn gorgeous language, the raw power of its brutality--gave me so much comfort and solace. In Yuknavitch's word embrace, I felt the magic of self-acceptance and self-love, and the crazy-wonderful beauty of life. If you are like me. You do not deserve most of what has happened or will. But there is something I can offer you. Whoever you are. Out there. As lonely as it gets, you are not alone.
There is another kind of love. Because I believe in art the way other people believe in god. In books and painting and music and film. This book? The water will hold you. View all 23 comments. May 28, Michael rated it really liked it Shelves: In sharp prose Yuknavitch hops around in time, recording her memories and artfully sequencing them.
A would-be professional swimmer who grew up in an abusive household and struggled with addiction early in life, only to have found redemption through writing as an adult, the author has no shortage of subjects to consider.
Well worth checking out. Apr 23, jo rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: emilie, candibelle. Shelves: books-i-teach , queer , memoir , trauma , psychic-pain , mama-is-crazy , bisexual. View all 26 comments. Jul 22, Meg rated it did not like it. If you take any kind of creative writing classes, or study literature at the college level you will already be familiar with the push toward legitimizing creative non-fiction memoirs.
Fiction, poetry, non-fiction, or mix genre. Good writing stands on its own and transcends any genre. It reads like any other self-obsessed MFA non-fiction essay awaiting rejection in a lit mag slush pile. On a line level the prose is highly pretentious and indulges in narcissistic self-aware faux avant-garde technique applied ad naseum. At the line-level the book will drive an attentive reader bonkers. Anyone foreign to the MFA artsy-fartsy culture will just think there are a lot of typos and bad editing.
Which perhaps could be forgiven if the substance were weighty enough. Frankly, I feel that Yuknavitch is an unreliable narrator of her own life. All the up-close and personal details feel pimped and slimy. The events are not so much exposed and explored as they are posed and marketed.
In the age of internet porn, no one has the luxury of being a prude anymore. The former bad-girl turned house kitten Ph. Not even close. Yuknavitch guts her own credibility at every turn. I believe women can be just as narcissistically self-destructive as any man. What I condemn is the boredom of it all. Alcoholism, narcissism, and sex-addiction served straight with no chaser of complexity quickly becomes an easily dismissed, salaciously boring read.
It reads more like selling out. No, she looks into the eyes of her married lover and when he tells her he wants her to have his baby - Whoomp There It Is! At every turn I feel the authenticity of experience is withheld, my trust as a reader trampled, and my time wasted. I once heard a tragedy defined as a story where characters come close to transcending circumstances but fail to grow and live up to their potential.
View all 4 comments. Apr 30, Thomas rated it really liked it Shelves: read-on-kindle , own-electronic , nonfiction , biography-or-memoir , lgbtq. I consider Lidia Yuknavitch a hero for writing about her experiences of child abuse with such candor and rawness.
The first half of The Chronology of Water stunned me: her vivid descriptions of growing up with an abusive father and a passive mother felt both gripping and heartbreaking. Yuknavitch penned such great scenes about her childhood, using powerful verbs that rocketed me into her past as if I witnessed it with her. The way she writes about her emotions as a child, too - the terror, the h I consider Lidia Yuknavitch a hero for writing about her experiences of child abuse with such candor and rawness.
The way she writes about her emotions as a child, too - the terror, the helplessness, the rage - all resonated with my own experiences of child abuse and captured her younger self so well.
For the rest of the memoir, with great honesty, she writes about how she coped with her trauma: with lots of alcohol, lots of sex with women and men, a few marriages, and her more healthful vices, swimming and writing.
Throughout the book, she positions her physical body as a source of suffering, pleasure, and joy, describing her sexuality as well as the death of her first child with great sorrow, passion, and nuance. It felt more like a description of events that just so happened rather than the tight, careful construction of the first part of the book, or of a couple of my favorite memoirs about childhood abuse and recovery, such as An Abbreviated Life by Ariel Leve or Hunger by Roxane Gay.
I also groaned at the whole plot about a man's love and marriage saving her. While I respect her path to healing and feel happy about her growth, I just find the trope of romance as redemption overplayed.
Still, an important memoir I would recommend to anyone interested in trauma, queerness, and writing about the importance of writing. Again, I applaud Yuknavitch for her courage in sharing her story, especially with such a distinct and unapologetic voice. The parts about art as a source of healing really resonated with me as well. View all 8 comments. This really blew me away. Her nonlinear memoir ranges from her upbringing with an alcoholic, manic-depressive mother and an abusive father via the stillbirth of her daughter and her years of alcohol and drug use through to the third marriage where she finally got things right and allowed herself to feel love again after so much numbness.
Ken Kesey, who led a collaborative novel-writing workshop in which she participated in the late s, once asked her what the best thing was that ever happened to her. Swimming, she answered, because it felt like the only thing she was good at. In the water she was at home and empowered. There are so many vivid sequences, but two that stood out for me were cutting down a tree the Christmas she was four and the way her mother turned her teeth-chattering crisis into a survival game, and the drunken collision she had after her second ex-husband told her he was seeing a year-old.
The watery metaphor flowing through, as one woman learns to float free of what once threatened to drown her, is only part of what makes this book unforgettable. In the same body. It is possible to carry love and pain. In the water, this body I have come to slides through the wet with a history.
What if there is hope in that? Make up stories as if life depended on it. Jul 10, sarah gilbert rated it really liked it. I do not know what to say about the category of memoirs in which the writing resume is included as story.
I do not know what to say about memoirs which treat the relationships of their lives so coldly, throwing up the one-side-of-the-story like angry paint on a wall. Lidia graffitis her life story all over the lives of those she's known, and I am not sure whether I want never to have known her or to wish that I had. Edited: I know her, now, and I feel differently. Lidia, indeed, can write, and so I do not know what to say about the category of memoirs in which the writing resume is included as story.
Lidia, indeed, can write, and some of these chapters come out so much like prose poems that I would love to collect them and re-read just the parts that are beautiful and painful and honest. But she is also gripped with a need to be edgy, personal, raw, colloquial, experimental, profane.
Many times I cringe at the depiction of sex between the man or woman with whom she is engaging, or at the destruction done to her body by alcohol and drugs, or at her quick switches in voice and style that interrupt, for me, the dream-story. I know now i am meant to cringe. The dipping into and out of fiction -- always done quickly, at least -- is sometimes imaginative and brilliant and sometimes jarring. The gripping, holding tight to the symbolism is sometimes gorgeous and sometimes painful.
When there is a journal or magazine that calls a theme, I blanch at the inevitable piece that defines the word and uses it again and again too much. In a book, I prefer symbolic themes should number several, so that one is not left with the feeling, at the end of reading, that one has overeaten.
Edited: now I know this was not done without intention, without obsession, and I admire it as such. So many people have picked this book as one of their top five or 10 of the year; I worry that I am missing something. Or perhaps seeing too much. I am picky about the part of a memoir in which the author makes insights about themselves; I fear that this memoir is one of those that stubbornly refuses to be insightful. I do not get my moment of realization that drinking so much vodka and Scotch is bad for one's art.
I do not get my acknowledgement that her selfishness has harmed others in fact, the professors and ex-wives and old lovers are treated with derision. Some books are perfectly suited to me and I fall in love with all my heart. Others are such that I can only admire querulously and from a distance. At first I thought this was the latter. I see something in this, so much in this, and it's grown on me like the skin of a fish.
View 1 comment. Jul 17, Janet rated it it was amazing. This memoir sat on my shelf for at least year, a gift I somehow thought was about competitive swimming—sports being my least favorite subject.
But when I heard Yuknavitch read in Los Angeles, I realized that hers was one of the strongest literary voices I have ever heard, anywhere, at any time. I came right home and plunged in. Not in the self-helpy way, but in the way that great writing, ferocious wr This memoir sat on my shelf for at least year, a gift I somehow thought was about competitive swimming—sports being my least favorite subject.
Not in the self-helpy way, but in the way that great writing, ferocious writing, changes you. Hangs you out a window by your ankles and shakes you. Yuknavitch relates the story of her troubled, high-energy life in short chapters, building around incidents in her development, associatively structured rather than in the steady flow of conventional narrative. The spine of the book is water—for Yuknavitch did spend her childhood and adolescence as a competitive swimmer—but there are also other waters, like the water of the womb, and booze, and tears, stillbirth and death by drowning.
There are pools and rivers and oceans, and the underwater quality of drugs and distance from self. The daughter of a narcissistic architect--a rageaholic and self-justifying abuser--and a crippled, alcoholic housewife whose depression weighs down the household, but who also is capable at crucial moments of rising up to inspire and protect the young Lidia , Yuknavitch finds her identity in competitive swimming.
She has a natural affinity for the element, but more than that, it gives her an outlet for her strength, an escape from her family, a chance to excel, and a link to concerned people in outside world. It creates in her a girl ready to push back at life, and push back hard. The physicality of the book is incredible-- swimming and abuse and addiction, pregnancy and stillbirth, and a blistering erotic life.
The strength of that body, the unquenchable self. The chapter she chose to read that first night, about an erotic encounter, peeled the paint off the walls. Mar 26, Brittany rated it did not like it. This book is much too pretentious for its own good. I mean, if you like reading bullshit like 'I may have been crap at making a home and family, but I succeeded at building a wordhouse' or countless references to how we're all water and how often the author wet her pants as a child and how everything smells like urine oh my god my dead baby my dead baby return to the water what is punctuation maybe if I wasn't so obsessed with piss I would learn more about periods and how they are supposed to oc This book is much too pretentious for its own good.
I mean, if you like reading bullshit like 'I may have been crap at making a home and family, but I succeeded at building a wordhouse' or countless references to how we're all water and how often the author wet her pants as a child and how everything smells like urine oh my god my dead baby my dead baby return to the water what is punctuation maybe if I wasn't so obsessed with piss I would learn more about periods and how they are supposed to occur at least once a month Then this book might be for you.
She name-drops fairly often, priding herself on being a young protege of Ken Kesey supposedly because he thought she was hot at first, but then really really realized that she's a writer and the lover of a feminist writer in Eugene, Oregon She spends so much time talking about what this book supposedly isn't that she really doesn't get to what it's supposed to be.
Clearly a 'memoir' for people just like her, who want something profound to rise out of the ashes of words sloppily put on a page, often over and over. Simply put, this was one of those books that I nearly did not finish, but soldiered through--looking down at the progress bar on my Kindle the whole time, and thanking all the powers that be that I didn't pay cover price for it.
Sep 09, Elyse Walters rated it really liked it. My reason I'm rating this memoir 3. Lidia claims to be a 'weird', an edgy, writ My reason I'm rating this memoir 3. Lidia claims to be a 'weird', an edgy, writer. I agree! At the beginning of this story Lidia shares a tragic heartfelt story about the loss of her child. A very nonchalant attitude. Clearly Dysfunctional is the song of this novel Lidia was kicked out of college She was an athletic swimmer -who became an alcoholic, gained weight, took drugs, and becomes a sex addict.
As a grad student, Lidia sleeps with 3 Professors Later as a Professor herself Lidia sleeps with a grad student marries him When Lidia is fired from a teaching job for having an affair with a grad student -- she shows not an ounce of remorse , rather, self-righteous indignation. Weather Lidia is pretentious or not, she seems almost allergic to accordance and conformity. Nothing in this book was 'shocking' --or 'new'.
It was hard NOT to have negative judgments for the choices Lidia made in her life. This is a fast read --short chapters --less a 'book' --more a long blog! Do I recommend this book? Not Particularly. Help for the Self Proven Aid in Overcoming: shyness,molestation, fatness,spinsterhood, grief, disease, lushery, decrepitude Do rock the boat and do make waves View all 5 comments. Dec 30, Brittany M. My friend Heather mailed me this book.
She said she didn't particularly like it, but she also couldn't get it out of her head, so she wanted me to read it so we could talk about it. What does it mean to despise a memoirist? Am I erasing their story because it doesn't conform to my expectations?
By looking down on their stories, am I reinforcing the idea that there's only on My friend Heather mailed me this book. By looking down on their stories, am I reinforcing the idea that there's only one true, "correct" way to narratize a downward spiral? What does it mean when you dislike an author for doing some of the same things that you've done?
Is it fair for me to be upset that so many of these memoirs end in the author's absolution through marriage and motherhood, even if the author, like Yuknavitch, had experimented plenty with folks of other genders? Maybe the "experimentation" is what bothers me. Do I dislike her memoir because I feel threatened by a powerful woman who actively claims the identity of a "broken" woman as well as its inverse?
Do I need to read more Kathy Acker? Yuknavitch pursued and was "pussy whipped" by Acker; she also said that anyone who can't get down with Acker's work is weak. I read and did not particularly like Blood and Guts in High School, but I also like to push myself to read things that I don't "like". Beyond my moral quandaries, I just didn't enjoy Yuknavitch's writing style. Maybe I'll check out her short stories, though? I don't know, this book gave me a lot to think about and I can't even really formulate my thought process here.
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Software Images icon An illustration of two photographs. Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. The chronology of ancient kingdoms amended. To which is prefixed, a short chronicle from the first memory of things in Europe, to the conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great Item Preview.
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