The Chronology of Water. Lidia Yuknavitch
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WITH LIGHT and incandescent beauty, The Chronology of Water cuts through the heart of the reader. These fierce life stories gleam, fiery images passing just beneath the surface of the pages. You will feel rage, fear, release, and joy, and you will not be able to stop reading this deeply brave and human voice.
DIANA ABU-JABER, author of Origin: A Novel
I LOVE THIS book and I am thankful that Lidia Yuknavitch has written it for me and for everyone else who has ever had to sometimes kind of work at staying alive. It’s about the body, brain, and soul of a woman who has managed to scratch up through the slime and concrete and crap of life in order to resurrect herself. The kind of book Janis Joplin might have written if she had made it through the fire - raw, tough, pure, more full of love than you thought possible and sometimes even hilarious. This is the book Lidia Yuknavitch was put on the planet to write for us.
REBECCA BROWN, author of The Gifts of the Body
FROM THE MOMENT I picked up The Chronology of Water, I couldn’t put it down, and I thought about it long after I’d finished. Reading this book is like diving into Yuknavitch’s most secret places, where, really, we all want memoir to take us, but it so rarely does. The reader emerges wiser, enlightened, and changed.
KERRY COHEN, author of Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity
THIS INTENSELY POWERFUL memoir touches depths yet unheard of in contemporary writing. I read it at one sitting and wondered for days after about love, time, and truth. Can’t get me any more excited than this.
ANDREI CODRESCU, author of The Poetry Lesson
THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER’S central metaphor works beautifully: we all keep our heads above water, look around, and enjoy our corporeal life despite all the reasons not to; beyond that, the book is immensely impressive to me on a human level: the narrator/speaker/protagonist/author emerges from a seriously hellish childhood and spooky adolescence into a middle age not of bliss, certainly, but of convincing engagement and satisfaction.
DAVID SHIELDS, author of Reality Hunger : A Manifesto
I’VE READ MS. YUKNAVITCH’S book The Chronology of Water, cover to cover, a dozen times. I am still reading it. And I will, most likely, return to it for inspiration and ideas, and out of sheer admiration, for the rest of my life. The book is extraordinary.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, author of Pygmy
LIDIA YUKNAVITCH’S MEMOIR The Chronology of Water is a brutal beauty bomb and a true love song. Rich with story, alive with emotion, both merciful and utterly merciless, I am forever altered by every stunning page. This is the book I’m going to press into everyone’s hands for years to come. This is the book I’ve been waiting to read all of my life.
CHERYL STRAYED, author of Wild
This book is for-and written through - Andy and Miles Mingo.
Acknowledgements
IF YOU HAVE EVER FUCKED UP IN YOUR LIFE, OR IF THE great river of sadness that runs through us all has touched you, then this book is for you. So thank you for the collective energy it takes to write in the face of culture. I can feel you.
Energy never dies. It just changes forms. My beloved friends and mentors Ken Kesey and Kathy Acker are in the space dust and DNA and words.
Thank you Rhonda Hughes, editrix extrodinaire, as well as all the people at Hawthorne Books for believing in my writing. Bold Swimmers.
Thanks to Lance and Andy Olsen, my artheart heroes. And to Ryan Smith and Virginia Paterson, through the miles.
To Diana Abu Jaber, thank you for saying to me twenty years ago about a single story, “I think this might be a book.” It just took me a really long time to get it.
Thank you to the less than Merry Pranksters, particularly Bennett Huffman: rest peacefully, Bennett, you were the best among us, chaotic, beautiful stardust.
A great waterfall of thanks to Michael Connors for, well, everything, and to Dean Hart, for making the everything possible. Thank you for mercifully loving all the me’s I have brought to your doorstep.
Thank you to the greatest writing group in the history of ever: Chelsea Cain, Monica Drake, Cheryl Strayed, Mary Wysong, Diana Jordan, Erin Leonard, Suzy Vitello, and Chuck Palahniuk. And Jim Frost.
Special thanks to Chelsea for writing the introduction, and to Chuck for inviting me in, and to Chuck and Chelsea for reading early versions of this manuscript and helping me to not lose my marbles. Well at least sometimes.
I would not be around to write this book had it not been for my sister going ahead of me. To Brigid who was Claudia: how to thank you for the lifeline of your enduring love. You have carried me well. Sister. Friend. Other mother. Poet of most tender thunder.
And though words suddenly seem remarkably puny, my pounding heart belongs to Andy and Miles -you make me able to be. Write. This love. Life. I didn’t know.
Introduction
Chelsea Cain
LIDIA AND I ARE IN THERAPY TOGETHER.
That’s what she calls it. Technically it is more of a writing workshop, at least that’s what the rest of us would like to think. It works like this. We meet once a week. Some of us bring work. We all critique it. Then someone goes into the bathroom and cries.
Lidia joined two years ago.
Chuck Palahniuk brought up the idea of inviting her. “She writes this literary prose,” he told us. “But she’s this big-breasted blond from Texas, and she used to be a stripper and she’s done heroin.” Needless to say, we were impressed.
I already wanted her to sit by me.
There was more. Chuck told us that some really famous edgy writer-I didn’t recognize her name, but I pretended that I did-had given a talk at a conference about the State of Sex Scenes in Literature and she’d said that all sex scenes were shit, except for the sex written by Lidia Yuknavitch. Maybe Chuck didn’t tell us that. But someone in the group did. I don’t remember. I think I was still thinking about the stripper thing. Areal-life ex-stripper in our writing group! So glamorous.
Yes, we said, invite her. Please.
She showed up a few weeks later, wearing a long black coat. I couldn’t see her breasts. She was quiet. She didn’t make eye contact. She did not sound like she was from Texas.
Frankly, I was a little disappointed.
Where was the big hair, the Lucite platform heels? The track marks?
Had Chuck made the whole thing up? (He does that sometimes.)
How was he describing me to people?
Lidia had pages. That first night she came. She shared work. If you are a writer, or really a human at all, you will recognize how terrifying this is. You show up and sit down with a group of strangers and share your art, having no idea how they will respond, these assholes marking up your pages with their pens, judging you, leering at your tits.
She read us the first chapter of her novel The Small Backs of Children (due out with Hawthorne Books next year), while we all followed along with the copies she’d passed out. They say that alcoholics remember their first drink, that lightening feeling in your body that says yes-yes-let’s-feel-this-way-all-thetime -well, I will always remember the first time I heard Lidia Yuknavitch read.
I thought, this is how writing is supposed to be. I thought, man oh man, she’s good. I thought, I want that.
Literally. I