In water, like in books – you can leave your life.

I don’t exactly know what I just read but Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir, The Chronology of Water, has left a deep impression.

Her story is told sometimes in lush, rolling sentences; sometimes in angry snatches; and sometimes in an anguished monologue. She explores themes of being a daughter, abuse, addiction, self-destruction, failed relationships, mothering, and grief.

I hated my father most of all, a hate that never left but just changed forms. My life had been ruined by men.

It’s complex, and made me think of that game, Whac-a-Mole – her rage, popping up again and again, and her ‘dealing’ with it in initially ineffective ways (drugs, alcohol and abusive relationships), noting that ‘…sometimes it’s difficult to tell rage from love’.

Little tragedies are difficult to keep straight. They swell and dive in and out between great sinkholes of the brain.

Ultimately, redemption for Yuknavitch comes from the unlikeliest of places – a writing workshop run by counterculture legend Ken Kesey, who has the students create an experimental collaborative novel. Yuknavitch and Kesey have something significant in common – the death of their children – and they form a particular bond (with a side serve of daddy-issues).

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 it is right in front of them. It’s a shame we carry. The shame of wanting something good.

On writing, she says –

The more you describe a memory, the more likely it is that you are making a story that fits your life, resolves the past, creates a fiction you can live with. 

From a structural point of view, the memoir seems a little unorganised to begin. This is not a story told in chronological order, but instead, fragments of memory, giving a sense of unreliability to her voice. But stick with it because somehow a bigger picture emerges, and it is splendid.

Water flows through the whole story – initially focused on her years as a competitive swimmer; the loss of her first child, stillborn, and the significance of river stones; the near drowning of her father; and then, many years later, the joy of swimming with her son.

The rocks. They carry the chronology of water. All things simultaneously living and dead in your hands.

Sometimes I think I have always been a swimmer. Everything collected in my memory curls like water around events in my life.

I know this book won’t be for everybody – the themes are grim but there are triumphs for Lidia, and moments of reckoning which give her story a sense of peace (as distinct from the standard ‘abuse memoir’ that ends in some form of salvation). In my copy of the book, there’s an interview with Yuknavitch at the finish, in which she rails against the cliches of the incest/ abuse/ addiction narratives and states that her story is no more important than anyone else’s, and nor is she claiming an incest narrative to sell books. Instead –

My goal is to put the reader into the space of childhood and your adulthood where fear and confusion and rage get born—like they do in us all for different reasons. To put the reader in their body through language. … Language helps us feel less separate.

In the same interview, she discusses grief –

I’m not sure it is possible to articulate grief through language. You can say, I was so sad I thought my bones would collapse. I thought I would die. But language always falls short of the body when it comes to the intensity of corporeal experience. The best we can do is bring language in relationship to corporeal experience – bring words close to the body – as close as possible. Close enough to shatter them. Or close enough to knock a body out.

She may feel that she hasn’t captured grief through language but I found this book to be a visceral reading experience. Her description of the stillbirth of her daughter is brutal, and her experience of grief equally so –

When they finally took her away from me, the last cogent thought I had, a thoughtlessness that would last months: so this is death. Then a death life is what I choose.

People don’t know how to be when grief enters a house. She came with me everywhere, like a daughter. No one was any good at being near us.

The energy with which Yuknavitch writes is extraordinary – it’s relentless, and there were moments when I put the book down, emotionally wrung out. And not just from her incandescent rage, but also from joy and sorrow. I loved it.

5/5

Every day after school and before swim practice I sat with her in the living room while she watched television soaps and drank. She looked exactly like a zombie. But one day, she put down the giant vodka tonic she was drinking. She dug into her purse. She said, “Lidia.” She handed me a newspaper advertisement for a writing contest. Out of the fucking blue.