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The Chronology of Water

by Lidia Yuknavitch (Goodreads Author), Chelsea Cain (Introduction)

4.21 of 5 stars 4.21 · rating details · 1,599 ratings · 324 reviews

This is not your mother’s memoir. In The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch expertly moves the reader through issues of gender, sexuality, violence, and the family from the point of view of a lifelong swimmer turned artist. In writing that explores the nature of memoir itself, her story traces the effect of extreme grief on a young woman’s developing sexuality that some...more

Paperback, 268 pages

Published April 12th 2011 by Hawthorne Books (first published April 1st 2011)

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Apr 21, 2013 sarah gilbert rated it 4 of 5 stars

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...more 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 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. (Indeed, it's defended in the Q&A section at the back; I part-admire and part-horrify at her perversion of the rehab story.) 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. (less)

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Jul 29, 2012 tee rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: e-pube, favourites, i-own

I am sitting here in a dazed stupor, sleep-deprived and my head buzzing with the tinnitus that comes with insomnia. I couldn't put this fucking book down. I don't know if I have connected with a book like I did this one since the days when I discovered Winterson. I devoured this book. I'm still not full, I want more. I read it in 50 page chunks without noticing the passing of time. 1am, 3am. It was less than ten degrees and yet I couldn't move to fetch another blanket. I paused at 5.30 this morn...more

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Aug 20, 2012 Karima rated it 4 of 5 stars

Very difficult for me to assign stars to this book. I hated parts of it. Had to slam it closed and say, "No more!"
Shake myself free of it like a dog after a dunk in a pool of toxic water. Found much of the language unnecessarily raw and ugly. Throughout much of the reading I would have been inclined to give it two stars. Also, very much dislike the technique that is becoming more and more prevalent of late, where an author uses periods to add emphasis. Is this a literary device? Does it have a n...more

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Sep 25, 2012 Ulla rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: book-club-options

I HATED reading this memoir until I was about 3/4 into it. Being cautious by nature, I simply didn't understand Lidia Yuknavitch AT ALL. I didn't care much for the in-your-face writing style, and I was appalled by her risky behavior - sexually, chemically, emotionally, physically, you name it. It is sex with random strangers, all kinds of drugs, any kind of drug, oceans of alcohol, partying, DUIs, criminal activities, blackouts, and it just goes on and on and on. I don't know how many times I th...more

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Dec 05, 2012 Dayna rated it 5 of 5 stars

Lidia, thank you for writing this. A rough, yet enjoyable read of coming to terms with being a woman, in this life. Her being a swimmer and her love of water only deepened my relating to her. I completely understand the meditative, mesmerizing qualities of water/swimming laps. "I want to just be in water. In the voiceless blue. In the weightless wet." In fact, if I don't swim for a while I start to dream about it- it's like my brain has to take me there, if I cannot get to the water myself. Yuka...more

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Mar 15, 2012 jo rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: emilie, candibelle

Shelves: memoir, queer, trauma, psychic-pain, mama-is-crazy, 4class, books-i-teach

this memoir is larger than life. lidia yuknavitch is larger than life. she is smart, funny, talented in about a thousand ways (she thinks the only thing she does well is swim but of course that's ridiculous), and a barrelfull of life. she's got so much life in her, she had to use gargantuan amounts of booze, drugs, and sex to put it all to sleep. and still, she didn't manage.

as a writer, she might annoy you. some of the things she says here annoyed me. i got annoyed when she wholesale-dissed 'n...more

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Apr 17, 2011 Keri rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book really hit home with so many things for me, and my experiences are really nowhere near the author's. This is an intense read that is impossible to put down.

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Mar 26, 2013 Brittany rated it 1 of 5 stars

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...more

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Jan 30, 2013 Peggy Bird rated it 3 of 5 stars

When trying to figure out how to review this book, I'm of two minds. One part of me says, look, I admire the writer's skill. I like the water analogy--I think most of us have felt at some time or another as if we are in the control of a strong current rushing us around rocks and crooked banks with no sense of where we are going. I enjoyed her take on the writing life. She set out to break out of the constraints of the idea of memoir and did a good job of it.

The other part of me says, oh, no. No...more

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Jan 02, 2013 Amber rated it 5 of 5 stars

There are moments in our lives when something crosses our paths that, at that moment, we need more than anything else. As I reached a difficult crossroads in my life, this book pushed or pulled me into the light and away from a darkness I thought I might never escape. There's plenty of darkness, here, but as a kindred woman who has also breathed and lived my share of rage and pain, it was that darkness that, ironically, lit my way - to guide myself toward and down a more constructive path. You o...more

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Dec 11, 2012 Ylva Nora Ulvestad rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

Once upon a time there was a little girl who was sexually abused by her father and emotionally neglected by her alcoholic and suicidal mother. It could have been already the end of the story but this is only the beginning.

Lidia Yuknavitch got me already at the first page. Her (anti-) memoir "The Chronology of Water" starts with a blow, a stillborn daughter. Death in the beginning, where life should have been. She crawled under my skin and made me question... everything. Not only her own life wi...more Once upon a time there was a little girl who was sexually abused by her father and emotionally neglected by her alcoholic and suicidal mother. It could have been already the end of the story but this is only the beginning.

Lidia Yuknavitch got me already at the first page. Her (anti-) memoir "The Chronology of Water" starts with a blow, a stillborn daughter. Death in the beginning, where life should have been. She crawled under my skin and made me question... everything. Not only her own life with all the ups and downs (and there are quite a few of the latter) but also my own, privileged one. I cried with her, I smiled with her, I nodded silently "yes".

Lidia Yuknavitch writes with her whole body; with the mind of an academic, with the passion of a lover, with the elegance of a swimmer, with the angst of an abused child, with the desperateness of a junkie, with the lack of self-esteem of a troubled soul, with the sensuality of a poet, with the punch of a boxer, and with the tenderness of a mother. It is more than "only" a memoir, more than "this is my life and I am messed up because...". No apologies, no redeeming quality, she just narrates matter-of-factly. Organized in short chapters, going backwards, forwards, any which way the memory sees fit.

Lidia Yuknavitch opens herself up, gives over her whole life. Mindboggling and heartwrenching and troubled as it is/was. Lidia slices one open and then puts one back again, just this time in the right order.

A competitive swimmer in her teenage years she finds peace of mind in the water throughout her whole life. The water analogies are criss-crossing the whole memoir, with beautiful images and she is ever-coming back to the pool, a lake or the ocean. When she spreads the ashes of her dead father, or with her son who didnt want to dive with his head under water because of Harry Potter. Dont ask. *smile* There it is, the sometimes darkly humor, underlying in the current of the narrative. But it is ever so lovely too.

The sexual abuse is overshadowing the whole narrative even the explicit mentioning of it is kept off the pages. Sexuality seems a way to seek for redemption. It is impersonal, random, not because of love. She participates in S/M parties, lesbian threesomes, got pussy-flogged by Kathy Acker or her breasts whipped by a partner. Alot of those seems close to a catholic confession. I know I am not worthy but please forgive me my sins. This is hard to bear, one almost feels like nailed to a cross.

She finally finds love with a former student of hers when teaching creative writing, fellow writer and independent film-director Andy Mingo. A new life is born, a new life for them is shaped. Lidia managed to held her head above the water, after years of alcoholism, of drug abuse, of ever struggling with herself. She has messed up alot high and mighty but love and love for writing seems to get hold the better of her. Maybe there it is finally, the redemption. In her love for the written word.

At the end of the book there is an interview with Lidia Yuknavitch. I have not read it yet. But I will. One day. Once I have my strength back to face her again, then we will meet a second time. Lidia is the person I would love to go swimming with. Maybe I would drown, and maybe she would let me, but I wouldnt mind. Not anymore.(less)

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Nov 09, 2012 Shanna Germain rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: nanolomo-books

What is the word for loss when the word isn’t enough? What is the word for love when it is full of breaking? What is the word for hope when the face is buried beneath the water’s surface and the tongue is stiff with regret?

Lidia Yuknavitch's beautiful memoir doesn't give us answers to those questions, or to any questions, really. Instead, it gives us what we really ache for -- the understanding that we're not alone. That we aren't the only ones who are all fucked up and broken and beautiful ins...more What is the word for loss when the word isn’t enough? What is the word for love when it is full of breaking? What is the word for hope when the face is buried beneath the water’s surface and the tongue is stiff with regret?

Lidia Yuknavitch's beautiful memoir doesn't give us answers to those questions, or to any questions, really. Instead, it gives us what we really ache for -- the understanding that we're not alone. That we aren't the only ones who are all fucked up and broken and beautiful inside. That even as we swear no one else has ever done this or felt this or wanted this, we really ache to know that someone out there has been through this already, that someone out there has done this too -- lived.

As soon as I read this book, I wanted to give a copy to everyone I know and love. To everyone who's been afraid of themselves and their own power (and that's everyone I know). To everyone who's hated themselves and loved themselves at the same time. Who's found pleasure in pain and pain in kindness. Who's turned away and turned away and turned away enough times that they've found themselves exactly where they began. Especially to everyone who struggled to find the words for what they were going through, for their losses and loves and life.

Reading this memoir is sometimes like feeling the the ocean bear down on us with a roar, slapping us back into our primordial beginnings. Sometimes it's the calm, smooth stroke of the swimming lanes, lap, turn, repeat. Sometimes it's the slow trickle of an accidental pee while laughing with friends. Often, it's the salt-sweet taste of a lover on your lips. But always it is a flow of language and life that is impossible to refuse. Water begets life, it crushes life, it wears a hole into the rock, it goes around the boulder, it points the way and circles back upon itself. This memoir does all of that and more.

What is the word for story when the word is not enough? What is the word for love when it steals the very breath from your lungs and gives you the glue to mend the broken bits? What is the word for memoir when it breaks you open and drowns you with language and heartbreak and a promise, not of a perfect life, but of a real life, a true life?

I don't know. But I bet Lidia does. (less)

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Sep 04, 2012 Chelsea rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-in-2012

This book is holy. It is the closest thing to a bible I have found. I starred so many quotes in it that I might as well have just put a giant star over the whole book. Read it. Even if you do not carry around girl rage, or daughter rage, or destruction as method of salvation. Read it if you are human, if you have a heartbeat and if sometimes that heartbeat threatens to burst right out of your chest, if you feel love, hate, desperation ... if you feel. Please, just read it. I wish I could give a...more

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Aug 21, 2012 Bryan rated it 4 of 5 stars

When I read a book, it is generally for the purpose of acquiring factual knowledge about the universe and the way it works. How all the pieces fit together to form a beautiful mosaic of understanding. Sciency stuff. Awe-inspiring. Erudite. Some might even say a little drab, dull and stuffy.

But then, every once in a while, I pick up a book with the intent to feel powerfully, deeply. Butterflies in my stomach. Lightheaded as if high. Nauseated as if ill. Disarmed. Paralyzed and powerless. And I h...more

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Aug 02, 2012 Renee rated it 4 of 5 stars

A four and a half star book for sure.
After I finished reading Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water I felt like my brain and soul had been given a chemical peel. This is a very different sort of memoir raw and sad and real and scary and also at times verbally offensive.

At one point I thought, must Yuknavitch describe breasts as "tits" and a vagina as "twats"? I cringed each time I read her fire bombs, but I felt a writer of this depth has to be about so much more than shock value. And she...more

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Jul 24, 2012 Dena Rash rated it 5 of 5 stars

I spoke of this book the other night while introducing the author at a literary event. After, a number of people thanked me for so clearly stating my complex reaction to the book, because they shared it as well. It was indeed complex and I know no one who's had a mild reaction to it.

I don't know if I would have given it five stars the first time I read it.It is well done, no doubt. It is full of exquisite language and story telling, but it was hard for me to remember the first time this wasn't...more I spoke of this book the other night while introducing the author at a literary event. After, a number of people thanked me for so clearly stating my complex reaction to the book, because they shared it as well. It was indeed complex and I know no one who's had a mild reaction to it.

I don't know if I would have given it five stars the first time I read it.It is well done, no doubt. It is full of exquisite language and story telling, but it was hard for me to remember the first time this wasn't fiction, and I kept getting so angry at so many people in the book, including the narrator. My anger at the abusers in the book was just, and didn't confuse me, but my anger at the narrator really ate me up. It made no sense to me. I put it down, angry and exhausted, though very uplifted in another way, and went on to read some easy book like Madame Mao by Anchee Min, which is actually not easy at all, but compared to this, that poetic telling of Madame Mao's murderous life is like reading nursery rhymes.

Then I went back and read it again and what I realized I was mad at, of course, myself.

This revelation actually helped me forgive myself for this and for that mistake and misgiving just a little bit more. Many things I am angry at myself over in this life are not much like the author's experiences at all, but this book was a huge trigger. I never faced abuse nearly like the author faced, but who hasn't been hurt by those they need? It's the worst part of the abuse; the fact that you feel like you need the person. This book sort of drove that thought home to me.

I am glad I read it twice, and I will read it again. I don't know that the author wrote it to help anyone forgive herself, but that was a side effect of swallowing this pill twice. Her story is told very, very well. It's true in a very exquisite way. She's deeply and truly human here, and I am not sure what more we can be in such personal art than that. I saw another reviewer describe this book as a heart, and it reminds me of lungs. It's a personal book and evoked a very personal response in me. (less)

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Jan 11, 2013 sarah louise rated it 3 of 5 stars

this is an important story. I was moved and gladdened by the rawness and openness around abuse and death and sex and addiction and pain. there were moments of 4.5-star writing that clutched at me.

it also felt about 100pp too long. I am all for defying convention as the author insists, multiple times in different ways, she is doing. I also don't think that's an excuse for laziness, and much of this text felt like a first-draft. a first draft with fire. also, a first draft.

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May 12, 2012 Andy Miller rated it 4 of 5 stars

A memoir of a writer/English professor who grew up in abusive home, had a stillbirth when still young and uses swimming, writing and her third husband to restore her life--though the author, Lidia Yuknavitch, may disagree that her life has been completely restored.

This is an intense book and there were passages that I enjoyed so much that I reread them again and again. There were sections that were disturbing that haunted after the reading, there were also sections where she came off full of her...more

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Feb 27, 2012 Paul rated it 2 of 5 stars

Call me "old-fashioned", "conservative", whatever, but this was a very irritating book. Yes, I'm sure some of what she wrote was *meant* to be vexing and maybe even irritating, but it was just too much for me.

For one thing, I don't like the whole psychological attitude of "I had a rough childhood and that was my excuse for ruining the next few decades of my life". Sorry, it just comes off as whiny and immature, when there are so many others who, in the face of adversity, can rise above it in a...more Call me "old-fashioned", "conservative", whatever, but this was a very irritating book. Yes, I'm sure some of what she wrote was *meant* to be vexing and maybe even irritating, but it was just too much for me.

For one thing, I don't like the whole psychological attitude of "I had a rough childhood and that was my excuse for ruining the next few decades of my life". Sorry, it just comes off as whiny and immature, when there are so many others who, in the face of adversity, can rise above it in a vastly more respectable manner.

She freely admits (more than once) how she would drink and drive, ultimately resulting in her tragic head-on collision with a woman who she describes as a "5' tall brown skinned pregnant woman"—yes, six or seven months pregnant, at that. Oh, and that's just the tip of the iceberg; there seem to be decades of her life that were a mere blur involving every kind of drug, every kind of sexual deviation (including some weird fetish involving *breaking into people's homes* to do it there, along with stealing their alcohol and drugs), every kind of crime (possibly short of murder), and so on. The whining goes on and on for half the book, where you watch her unapologetically throw her life away, throw her scholarship away, throw everything that matters away... with zero remorse.

And the "zero remorse" carries through into the present, where you can't help but feel as though she would do it all again the same, given the opportunity. It also carries through in her storytelling, in how she seems to think that things like "slitting the tires of Republicans" and "steal[ing] all the heads of roses" from gardens, is not something about which even now she should be remorseful or express any fault.

Then there is the bitter, but almost ironic, story which opens the book with the tragic birth of her stillborn child. Inexplicably, though, that one life lost tugged pretty seriously at her heartstrings, while her *multiple* abortions seemed to have, in contrast, zero effect on her.

Also, there was the smattering of transparent, unabashed, overt name-dropping all over the place (Ken Kesey, Kathy Acker, etc.) and what antics she was up to with them that just seemed like too much. Some of it was clearly legitimate to her life's story, but some of it just seemed like exactly that: transparent, unabashed, overt name-dropping.

And, finally, there was the issue of her writing style. While her poetic prose was at some points really captivating and powerful, quite often it was just over the top like someone who learns a cool trick and just can't stop repeating it and ends up abuses the crap out of it. It almost seemed too forced, like "look at me, I'm writing a future *classic* because I'm using such heterodox methods and style and such outrageous words and ideas!" Had she toned it all down and made it more subtle, it would have been a lot more meaningful and the emotions a bit more believable to me.

Yes, there are those who would call me "callous" for this review, given the troubles she might have faced, whether physically or psychologically, but, again, I'd have a much easier time accepting this had there been even a small sense of remorse or regret for all the opportunities wasted, the lives hurt, and the damage done to others. But, no; it was all about "me me me". Quite contemporary in that sense.(less)

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Feb 26, 2012 Nicole Cleary rated it 4 of 5 stars

There are many stories about women who survive abuse as children, stagger through addictions and darkness, and eventually find their way to a life with measured happiness. I generally like this genre because I like stories of resilience. The Chronology of Water is an interesting contribution because of the raw, funky, unapologetic style with which it is written. Lidia Yuknavitch's writing style can aptly be described as what happens when you drink deeply from the "Write like a motherfucker" coff...more

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Dec 26, 2011 Jonny-Loves-ta-Read rated it 4 of 5 stars

This raw memoir should be read slowly, and with alcohol or psychoactive drugs at hand. Reading about Yuknavitch’s insights regarding her experiences as an abused child, alcoholic, competitive swimmer, frightened daughter, academic, mother, drunk driver and countless other identities that she slips in and out of is exhausting. Exhausting and rewarding. Discovery of self and the process of beginning to humanize herself and her dysfunctional family are common themes not explicitly described but vis...more

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Nov 28, 2011 Benjamin Zapata rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A beautiful,tender,and heartbreaking book,....I read it at one sitting,the writing is just breathtaking. Lidia Yuknavitch has composed a memoir that teaches while it entrances,and find hope and faith in the most unlikely places. She has given us a magnetic and searingly potray of her life,keeping nothing back. There are certain books that stay with you long after the last page-Lidia Yuknavitch's "The Chronology of Water" is that very type book. Here's some reviews from some authors: "I've read t...more

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May 24, 2011 Diane Prokop rated it 5 of 5 stars

When I read a book, I stick little Post-it notes at the top of a page so that when I find something particularly smart, poignant or noteworthy I can find my way back. By page 100 of the memoir, The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch, I realized that almost every page had a Post-it, so I gave up. It’s that smart and that poignant and that good.
Yuknavitch uses the running theme of water to look back at her life from Olympic swimming hopeful, to winning a college swimming scholarship, to her...more

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Apr 24, 2011 christa rated it 4 of 5 stars

Sitting on my couch. Listening to noninvasive, lyric-less music with headphones. Reading Lidia Yuknavitch's memoir "The Chronology of Water." I stop. Check the time. Two hours have passed since I last came up for air. Whoa. She just drugged me. Plopped me in front of a psychedelic screen saver and had her way with my brain when I wasn't looking.

My friend sent me an email first telling me that she'd had a dream that she told me we don't like the same books. We don't in real life, this is true, sh...more Sitting on my couch. Listening to noninvasive, lyric-less music with headphones. Reading Lidia Yuknavitch's memoir "The Chronology of Water." I stop. Check the time. Two hours have passed since I last came up for air. Whoa. She just drugged me. Plopped me in front of a psychedelic screen saver and had her way with my brain when I wasn't looking.

My friend sent me an email first telling me that she'd had a dream that she told me we don't like the same books. We don't in real life, this is true, she acknowledged in the letter. Except Haruki Murakami. Still, she tells me, read this book. But first she tells me that it starts with a dead baby and then segues into incest, heavy drug use and sex.

It does start with a dead baby. It does have heavy drug use. There is, indeed, sex. And there is this unconventional sentence structure, poetic snippets, soul-squeezing scenes that left me dizzy. This is not my style of reading at all. Prosey-prose, heavy with metaphor. The kind of writing that sounds like it should be read aloud to a room full of people who will later deconstruct it like they are putting puzzle pieces back into a box. In the hands of a lesser writer, which is to say almost any other writer, this would be too written-y and self-conscious. But damn Yuknavitch has a way with words. She knows how to write a word like "bloodsong" and not have it sound like a workshop cliche.

Consider the chapter at about dead center where she writes the story of falling in love with the man who becomes her second husband. It is about five pages heavy on activity and light on periods that reads like fast-forwarding through video footage of a relationship from beers and bars and bikes to the part where he meets someone else and Lidia loses a bunch of grief weight and everyone tells her how pretty she looks. It is pitch perfect.

It starts:

"Year one we drink Guinness mostly all the time and we ride Mountain bikes around Eugene at night and we go to the Vet's Club we go to the Vet's Club we go to the Vet's club we go to the High Street Cafe hey I'll give you my student load wad of $700 if you kiss the guy who joined us for a drink he does we laugh we drink we fuck."

She is a swimmer, from birth, probably until death. And everything in her life comes back to water. She trades her strong back and wicked stroke for full ride scholarship to get out of Florida and away from her sexually abusive father and her alcoholic, limping mother. She goes wild in Lubbock, Texas. Falls in love with a James Taylor-sort. Marries him even. But they are separated when she leaves for Oregon to live with her sister, bulging with baby, and he follows her and moves into a place across town. The baby is born dead. Her ashes are spilled into water.

So this book is really something. The scenes painted in a fantastic way and the stories are edited to a sexy, sometimes shocking, truth: Lidia, drunk, sitting on a statue of Buddy Holly. Getting into a fight with her boyfriend. Screaming at him as he drunk drives them home, passing out before they get there. She opens the car door and runs off into the night; Lidia and her best friend picked up by a boyish-looking classmate, a woman who whisks them away for a free love weekend at a hotel; Lidia having a manic laughing fit, waist-deep in water, while trying to get rid of the ashes of the daughter that was stillborn.

I will concede that I can only read sentences referencing how wet underwear/panties/the seat became after this or that happened without tiring of it. She uses it literally, she uses it metaphorically. It loses its energy. And every once in awhile Yuknavitch turns to face her audience and address the reader, which is distracting. Other than that, big ups.(less)

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Apr 21, 2011 Heather Fowler rated it 5 of 5 stars

In a memoir as beautiful as any I have read, Lidia Yuknavitch astounds with her gorgeous and unique and catastrophic truth-telling--with her driving ability to give meaning to those acts we each perform, almost casually, that violate the self and illuminate what clues we must use later for important self-reclamations. There is poetry here in this book. There is honesty here too--these combined with a vulnerability and level of craft that makes the language resonate in ways both large and small:...more

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Jul 25, 2011 Erin rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011

This book begins on a horrific note - a stillborn child - and from that point on, you are wrapped up in Lidia Yuknavitch, in all of her talent and beauty and selfishness and anger and brains. I finished this book and never wanted to return it to the library, and then I wanted to return it that second so that someone else could read it. I wasn't always comfortable; she is unflinchingly honest, and apparently not concerned with whether or not her readers like her. Sometimes I didn't. But I felt li...more

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Jun 23, 2011 Stephanie rated it 5 of 5 stars

out-freaking-standing. i want to read every word this woman has ever written.

exhibit 1: I fought like a woman whose father had betrayed her and whose mother abandoned her.

exhibit 2: I didn't know yet tha tdesire comes and goes whenever it wants. I didn't know yet that sexuality is an entire continents. I didn't know yet how many times a person can be born.

exhibit 3: You see it is important to understand how damaged people don't always know how to say yes, or to choose the big thing, even when...more

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Oct 06, 2012 Greta rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: biography

There are memoirs and there are memoirs. The interesting ones always have some extreme stuff going on. Most people don't want to read the story of a boring life. So Lidia certainly didn't have that. As with many who decide to tell their story, her trials and tribulations started in childhood. With her family. It went from there. Her attempts to find herself took her in directions many of us wouldn't think of going, and her trajectory was really all over the place. In any case, her story turned o...more

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Mar 11, 2011 David rated it 5 of 5 stars

Water is an unstoppable force. Given any obstacle, the sheer force of water will cut its way through or ignore the obstacle entirely and force its own way around. This is not a possibility, but an inevitability. Nothing withstands water’s power.

I found this interesting, given that water is a focal theme in Lidia Yuknavitch’s “The Chronology of Water,” as Yuknavitch’s prose has that same power. The very first line of the book reads: “THE DAY MY DAUGHTER WAS STILLBORN, AFTER I HELD the future pink...more Water is an unstoppable force. Given any obstacle, the sheer force of water will cut its way through or ignore the obstacle entirely and force its own way around. This is not a possibility, but an inevitability. Nothing withstands water’s power.

I found this interesting, given that water is a focal theme in Lidia Yuknavitch’s “The Chronology of Water,” as Yuknavitch’s prose has that same power. The very first line of the book reads: “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 could not beat to hold her, then out of the hospital room door, tiny lifeless swaddled thing, the nurse gave me tranquilizers and a soap and sponge.” Zang. That’s the only word I have to describe that opening sentence, zang.

That sentence has power, force. That sentence slammed into me and I knew it was either going to cut right through or ignore me entirely and go its own way around. I just grabbed on.

But this book doesn’t just have a great hook line. It isn’t that just this opening sentence has this immense power. No, the entire book is like this. Yuknavitch’s lines are an unstoppable force and it is a delight to read them and try to keep up.

Normally not one for memoir, I was lucky enough to get this book as my first encounter with The Rumpus Book Club. The most amazing thing to me, once I got my bearings from being smacked around by the language, was the fact that the mixture of horror and wonderfulness that is Yuknavitch’s life doesn’t take over the book as in so many memoirs. Sure, amazing and/or terrifying things have happened to Yuknavitch. Sure, she unflinchingly lays them open for the reader.

However, Yuknavitch finds the story within these happenings instead of just standing back and saying ‘look what happened to me.’ To me, Yuknavitch dominates her past to make it serve story instead of begging story to do homage to her life. She seemingly leaves out much that could garner easy emotional manipulation and sympathy but does not do the right work for the story. The result is one of the strongest memoirs I have had the pleasure to encounter.

As I do not normally go looking in memoir, I am doubly pleased that I was luckily introduced to this book through The Rumpus Book Club. Otherwise, I would have greatly missed out. I would suggest that others not make the same mistake I normally would have. Don’t miss this book.
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Jun 15, 2011 Paula Coomer rated it 5 of 5 stars

I'm finished, but I'm starting it again, and I'll likely read it a third time. Lidia's book has changed my life forever. She published my first short story and several others in her Northwest Edge collection of anthologies, and I've read with her several times. But I did not know who she really was. Turns out she's the bravest woman on earth, and maybe our most talented living female writer--certainly in the U.S. I would say do not miss this mind-blowing book--calling it a memoir is hugely insuf...more

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About Lidia Yuknavitch

LIDIA YUKNAVITCH IS THE AUTHOR of three works of short fiction: Her Other Mouths, Liberty's Excess, and Real to Reel, as well as a book of literary criticism, Allegories of Violence. Her work has appeared in Ms., The Iowa Review, Exquisite Corpse, Another Chicago Magazine, Fiction International, Zyzzyva, and elsewhere. Her book Real to Reel was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and she is the r...more

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Allegories of Violence: Tracing the Writings of War in Late Twentieth-Century Fiction

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Quotes from The Chronology of Water

“So yes I know how angry, or naive, or self-destructive, or messed up, or even deluded I sound weaving my way through these life stories at times. But beautiful things. Graceful things. Hopeful things can sometimes appear in dark places. Besides, I'm trying to tell you the truth of a woman like me.” — 16 people liked it

“Out of the sad sack of sad shit that was my life, I made a wordhouse.” — 16 people liked it

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