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.

A Memoir

The Chronology of Water

“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.”

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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.”

“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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