The Chronology of Water
Lidia Yuknavitch
Quick Thoughts:
Before I say anything regarding the book, can we agree on just this: Fathers of the world, sublimate your rage and spare your daughters and sons your particular perversions. And mothers, remember the number one rule of the jungle is to protect your young.
"Make up stories until you find one you can live with."
Therein is the strength and bane of memoir. Telling the truth slant is how we humans understand or make our world real, cut ourselves a break while damning others, or extend generosity through disremembering.
The latest research in neurobiology claims that the only pure memories are those locked away,forgotten, in the secret recesses of our gray matter, and that once a memory is given voice, the narrative alters, ever so slightly, and that a memory recounted numerous times is more fiction than truth. Isn't it just marvelous that our brains and our bodies believe memory is a real experience, that it is happening in real time, just like the brain and body believes the dream state is the same as being awake. It appears that even when a memoirist tells us they are telling it straight, that this is no effing Million Little Pieces, well perhaps just a minute fraction is. Yuknavitch plays on this when she tells us what happens, then tells us she was lying, and then retells it the real way, and then tells us she could say anything and we'd just have to take her word for it. Truth is, I don't care about veracity when it comes to memoir, because what happened only has to be true to the narrative you've chosen for yourself. What is particularly unsettling about this new memory research, it is Lidia's father who has the purest memories.
I did not cry one tear reading this memoir. I'm not saying that I didn't feel every emotion possible. What I'm saying is that I understand her rage, her narrative, her numbness, her escape into water, her ability to seek the very destruction that would take her to the edge of mortality. Help her to feel, something. I'm not appropriating her story or her rage or her brokenness or her stitching her bloody shreds back together again. All I'm saying is that I found a type of common ground. And I think you will too, no matter who you are.
I spent the day reading her life, watching Lidia go down, down the rabbit hole, to emerge somewhere else, the other side perhaps, into another self, another life.
There were sentences and sections that stopped me cold. Word and image like obsidian shards.
Twice, three times, I saw myself reflected exactly in the pages. I too gathered rocks when I was pregnant, lined the perimeter of my living room with field stones, placed head-sized rocks in the transoms, lined the windowsills and counters with miniature menhirs. I still have no idea why or for what purpose, other than I had to do it.
There were times when I lost my patience with Lidia. Thought if I have to hear one more time what is happening in or to her pants while looking at a beautiful man or woman, I would scream cliche or overshare or trite. And then times when I wondered how she survived her life. Also, how the people in her wake survived the tsunami of her. And then, I was grateful she left the details of what her father did with his hands to the imagination. Her pain, her dogged self-destruction, and Dantesque descent into each circle of hell were witness enough. She was generous with her father, who didn't deserve it, not really, even if he'd lost his memory of all that went before. Kind to a mother that didn't protect her, who dove into a bottle and stayed hidden from the reality of her life, her children's lives, in the shallows.
I suppose our makers deserve generosity and kindness, regardless of the dark places they press into us. I believe her father felt remorse but his need was greater than the need to stop. I believe her mother knew, all of it, but believed herself too powerless to stop the hideous reality of her life, her children's lives. Too fearful, I suppose, to just, leave, take her children with her. No regrets. But that isn't this story. The story we know is of a man who damaged, willingly, a woman who looked out the window, willingly, and children who took it until they escaped, and Lidia gave her rage to the world, her body a battering ram, until she found a more gentle way for herself.
Here's the thing: I want to know what happened to the woman who had no English in her, and the fate of her baby. I know about Lidia's penance of working the highways, and I assume if the baby had died there would have been a stronger penalty, but I really don't know California law. I do want to know if there was another deathbaby.
I suppose it depends on who you are and what has happened to you and what stage of grief, recovery, denial, addiction you are in if this book is for you. I think this book is for you and you and you. Each reader will see her or his reflection on the page.
You may not cry, but, you will feel, everything.
First Sentence:
The day my daughter was stillborn, after I held the future pink and rose-lipped in my shivering arms, lifeless tender, covering her face in tears and kisses, after they handed my dead girl to my sister who kissed her, then to my first husband who kissed her, then to my mother who couldn't bear to hold her, then out of the hospital room door, tiny lifeless swaddled thing, the nurse gave me tranquilizers and a soap and a sponge.
Favorite Parts:
"Little tragedies are difficult to keep straight. they swell and dive in and out between great sinkholes of the brain." p. 25
"It's hard to know what to think of a life when you're knee-deep." --
"Laughter can shake you from the delirium of grief." p. 26
"The rocks. They carry the chronology of water. All things simultaneously living and dead in your hands." p. 33
"Sometimes I think my voice arrived on paper." p. 37
"All the rooms of our house carried the weight of father." p. 46
"I pictured a suitcase... Big enough to fit the rage of a girl." p. 47
"My sister and I, we were selfish. We wanted selves." p. 50
"To be born has many meanings. How many times we leave a life, enter a new one." p. 53
"Even angry girls can be moved to tears." p. 59
"Addiction, she is in me, sure enough." p. 71
"I didn't know yet how wanting ot die could be a bloodsong in your body that lives with you your whole life. p. 72
"I didn't know we were our mother's daughters after all." --
"They fed me bible passages. I brought Mary Shelly's Frankenstein with me every day for moral support." p. 73
"This is something I know: damaged women? We don't think we deserve kindness. In fact, when kindness happens to us, we go a little berserk. It's threatening. Deeply. Because if I have to admit how profoundly I need kindness? I have to admit that I hid the me who deserves it down in a sadness well. Seriously. Like abandoning a child at the bottom of a well because it's better than the life she is facing. Not quite killing my little girl me, but damn close." p. 76
"The fact was, we were both adult women now. Living adult women lives. Meaning we had something very deeply inn common: the tyranny of a culture telling women who they should be." p. 77
"I only know my father's anger built the house." p. 81
"The death of our children swam in the water with us, curling around us, keeping us twinned and floating." p. 101
"I felt most alive near death anyway." p. 118
"What's the best thing that's ever happened to you in your life?" p. 121
"I closed my eyes and waited for the hands of a man to do what they did to women like me." p. 122
"I liked books more than people." --
"When I as 13 I confessed my father secrets in the black box of catholic too another father in the house of our father who told me I should not tell lies." "Honor thy father." "Say seven Hail Marys." "It's wicked to make up stories." p. 131
"...Joan of Arc...Girl with a war in her. voice of a father in her head. --
"I'm the rest of my life a burning girl." p. 132
"Jesus. What is a thin man pinned to wood next to the image of a burning woman warrior ablaze?" --
"All that day I stomped around fuming the fumes of a woman who doesn't know how to own her own intellect and blames i on men." p. 139
"Upside down I saw the sun and sky at the surface make silver blue electricity...The upsidedownness of blood in my skull made my head ache." p. 150
"My body in deep water. Weightless. Airless. Daughterless void." p. 151
"In water, like books - you can leave your life." p. 152
"In a beautiful wooden box, I have the hair of people I love." p. 155
"My mother said that as a girl, she let her hair grow log enough to cover her body, her deformed leg, her scars." p. 157
"The transgression will write her very body." p. 165
"...we drink and pass out in Joyce's country...we wish we were part of history we wish we were part of drinking we wish we were part of anything not ourselves we walk and walk but why do the pictures we took of each other have no smiles? p. 177
"Ask me about writing, well, that's fierce private." p. 181
"I am a woman who talks to herself and lies." p. 182
"That's when the two mes had it out." p. 184
"My first book came out of me in a great gushing return of the repressed...There were words and their was y body, and I could see through my own skin." --
"This is what Mary must have looked like after jesus. No way for the body to bear the miracle, the burden, the unbelievable history that moves the world without her body." p. 188
"It is not easy to leave one self and embrace another. Your freedom will scar you. Maybe even kill you. Or one your yous. " p. 190
"You see it as important to understand how damaged people don't always know how to say yes, or to choose the big thing, even when it is right in front of them. It's a shame we carry. The shame of wanting something good." p. 198
"Addicts have a problem comprehending gravitas." p. 211
"I could see the woman who would pick up a bottle of vodka and never put it down...The marriage that went so horribly wrong, and still she couldn't leave. I can see the mother whose children drifted so quickly away form her like fish cut loose." p. 211
"Sometimes I think I've been everywhere before." p. 227
"Literature is the medium. You have to swim in it." p. 230
"I know you are not used to women saying this, but I wanted him to drive down into me and eat me alive." p. 233
"Sweet hidden life in the water of me - the best thing I had to give." p. 242
"My god. How many ways are there to love men? It's enough to break a heart open." p. 252
"There is a way for anger to come out as an energy you let loose and away. The trick is to give it a form, and not a human target. The trick is to transform rage." p. 259
"Words carry oceans on their small backs." p. 270
"My father lost his memory in the arms of his daughter the swimmer." p. 278
"I drove my father's ashes up to Seattle pretty immediately because I didn't want them. I didn't want them in my house, or my garden, or any waterway near me or my son." p. 282
"We laughed the laugh of women untethered, finally, from their origins." p. 283
"I can still see my mother sitting in her car as I'd come out of swim practice as a kid. The heater running. Whatever else she was, she was there." P. 290
"If your marriage goes busto, make up a different you." p. 292
"Make up stories until you find one you can live with." --
"Make up stories as if your life depended on it."
"...beautiful things. Graceful things. Hopeful things can sometimes appear in dark places." p. 293
Author Bio:
In 1986 my daughter died the day she was born. From her I became a writer.
My writing is informed, deformed, and reformed by these things:
1.I think gender and sexuality are territories of possibility. Nevermind what we've been told or what the choices appear to be. Inside artistic practice the possibilities open back up.
2.I think narrative is quantum.
3.I think the writer is a locus through which intensities pass.
4.I think literature is that which fights back against the oppressive scripts of socialization and good citizenship.
5.I think the space of making art is freedom of being.
6.I think things that happen to us are true. Writing is a whole other body.
7.I believe in art the way other people believe in god.
I have had lots of jobs. Some of my favorites were being on an all male house painting crew, because you could see and touch your labor and it had concrete meaning and I could drink beer, pee standing up, and fart anytime I wanted; seasonal farm work like picking basil and fruit because I got to be outside and meet cool people; working on the road crew with Mexicans two of the times I was arrested.
In the more recent past all my jobs have been bourgeois teaching gigs. I don't know what I think about teaching. Mostly I show up and beg people to have a dialogue with me about ideas. I do feel lucky to have a job and health insurance. Its just hard to be an isolate and do something so public every day.
In Eugene I invented a magazine called two girls review. In Portland my husband and I made a press called Chiasmus (www.chiasmsumedia.net). Both are the result of radical collaborations.
Oh. And I am a very, very good swimmer. Which must be why, as from http://www.lidiayukna my friend Mia says, I have not drowned. When pulled under, kick. from http://www.lidiayuknavitch.net
Best Reviews:
Publisher's Weekly: If and when you ever write a book, this is the kind of review to pray to all the gods to receive.
Paste Magazine: You'll have to scroll down five paragraphs of memoir vs. novel argument to get to the review of Yuknavitch's memoir, so why not just read the whole review? A thorough review which addresses this fierce memoir, it's almost descent into sentimentality or the cliched territory of writing about addiction.
Bookslut:A site where you want to pull up a chair by the fireplace, kick your shoes off, and just let yourself surf until your heart bursts. The review is brief but covers just enough skin to titillate.
The Cult:Writer Chuck Palahniuk's site. A shout out and call to read. A wildly popular writer friend's grassroots campaign to get your book in the hands of as many readers as possible is another reason to genuflect.
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