Lidia Yuknavitch

From the debris of her troubled early life, Lidia Yuknavitch weaves an astonishing tale of survival. It is a life that navigates, and transcends, abuse, addiction, self-destruction and the crushing loss of a stillborn child. A kind of memoir that is also a paean to the pursuit of beauty, self-expression, desire – for men and women – and the exhilaration of swimming, The Chronology of Water lays a life bare.

The Chronology of Water

From the debris of her troubled early life, Lidia Yuknavitch weaves an astonishing tale of survival. It is a life that navigates, and transcends, abuse, addiction, self-destruction and the crushing loss of a stillborn child. A kind of memoir that is also a paean to the pursuit of beauty, self-expression, desire—for men and women—and the exhilaration of swimming, The Chronology of Water lays a life bare.

A Memoir

“Nothing nothing nothing nothing about me deserved it. But very deep down in me, very tiny, very afraid, was a girl who smiled from within the cavernous place I’d hidden her.

Is that love? Was it? I still don’t know. It’s possible. But none  of us are any good at naming it. It comes and then goes. Like songs do. I do know this: it’s the kind of thing that happens in stories.”

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“I didn’t know yet how wanting to die could be a bloodsong in your body that lives with you your whole life. I didn’t know then how deeply my mother’s song had swum into my sister and into me. I didn’t know that something like wanting to die could take form in one daughter as the ability to quietly surrender, and in the other as the ability to drive into death head-on. I didn’t know we were our mother’s daughters after all.”

“I thought about starting this book with my childhood, the beginning of my life. But that’s not how I remember it. I remember things in retinal flashes. Without order. Your life doesn’t happen in any kind of order. Events don’t have cause and effect relationships the way you wish they did. It’s all a series of fragments and repetitions and pattern formations. Language and water have this in common.

All the events of my life swim in and out between each other. Without chronology. Like in dreams. So if I am thinking of a memory of a relationship, or one about riding a bike, or about my love for literature and art, or when I first touched my lips to alcohol, or how much I adored my sister, or the day my father first touched me - there is no linear sense. 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.”

martian1138

This book reminded me of why I love to read so much. Yuknavitch is destructive, abrasive, at points unpleasant, and refreshingly human. May not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s not supposed to be -and that’s why I love it. 

the perfect book to introduce myself back into reading.. i took my time to finish it because i didn't want it to be over. probably the best book i've ever read! i'm so glad my gf had me read this i'm excited for what else i will indulge in :3 i think this is one of those books you just want to read over and over, like a comfort movie :3 

laura :3

body-sex-blood writing for burning girls compelled to fuck their open wounds. pulsing, oozing, gaping, ugly, unclean. hunger for death and excess. the body hollowed-out, torn apart, filled with more than it can take, flooded by tidal surges of overwhelming and unbearable affect. living fucked-up and fucking up again and again and again; life writing itself fucked by the Real, saturated with pain and violation and bodily fluids. horrifying. raw. aching. sexual. fragmented. polymorphous. sinthomic. morally fraught. i couldn't put this down. yuknavitch is a modern-day laure

eris

lidia's rawness is something that always stood out for me. 
"what lived and what died between us - haunts me still".

Cindy Lieberman

A brutal memoir. Compelling writing with an excellent audiobook narration. This is Lidia’s life from age 4 to 40-something as a swimmer, a sister, a “daughter” in the loosest of terms, a college dropout and a college-level teacher, a woman of contradictions, of missed and found opportunities, and finally of overcoming everything from her past to build a real family.

Chronology of Water

Arden Kowalski

crime and punishment also took me days to read however crime and punishment is actually good

Moray Lyle McIntosh

This will be my last dalliance with Yuknavitch. I passionately hated the Book of Joan and intensely disliked this. I only picked it up because I mistook the name for Yelena Moskovich (sorry, Yelena). I hate Yuknavitch's writing that markets itself as real and uninhibited but reads as sloppy and lazy. There are brilliant moments where you can see what her writing could be of she dropped her juvenile, give-no-f*cks attitude that often reads like a stroppy teenager. I also find some of her attitudes to sex and sexual partners, actual and potential, unsavoury and sometimes predatory. It wouldn't be okay if a heterosexual man wrote it and it's not okay for a bisexual woman. It's brutal honesty is commendable in it's way but some of the attitudes are not and honesty doesn't wipe them away.

Rebeca Keren Nuñez

Honesto y crudo, pero muy interesante. La historia tiene claros y oscuros, como las historias de todos. Lo que me resulto más interesante, es su perspectiva sobre la autopercepcion y la visión que se tiene y cómo se las representa en la literatura a las víctimas de abuso. La lectura por momentos se me hizo super vertiginosa, pero no podía parar de leer, porque también es atrapante.

Roger

Reading this book felt like a slap on the face where the sting didn’t let up until halfway through. I found myself holding my breath, chest tight, hands gripping the book like the narrative pulled me into its waters and my body couldn’t help but feel the stories.

The Chronology of Water

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