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Reading the Waves: A Memoir
The frank and revealing memoir of a writer who draws from her own creativity to heal.
"I believe our bodies are carriers of experience," Lidia Yuknavitch writes in her provocative memoir Reading the Waves. "I mean to ask if there is a way to read my own past differently, using what I have learned from how stories repeat and reverberate and release us from the tyranny of our mistakes, our traumas, and our confusions."
Drawing on her background -- her father's abuse, her complicated dynamic with her disabled mother, the death of her child, her sexual relationships with men and women -- and her creative life as an author and teacher, Yuknavitch has come to understand that by using the power of literature and storytelling to reframe her memories, she can loosen the bonds that have enslaved her emotional growth. Armed with this insight, she allows herself to look with the eye of an artist at the wounds she suffered and come to understand the transformational power this has to restore her soul.
By turns candid and lyrical, stoic and forgiving, blunt and evocative, Reading the Waves reframes memory to show how crucial this process can be to gaining a deeper understanding of ourselves.
"I believe our bodies are carriers of experience," Lidia Yuknavitch writes in her provocative memoir Reading the Waves. "I mean to ask if there is a way to read my own past differently, using what I have learned from how stories repeat and reverberate and release us from the tyranny of our mistakes, our traumas, and our confusions."
Drawing on her background -- her father's abuse, her complicated dynamic with her disabled mother, the death of her child, her sexual relationships with men and women -- and her creative life as an author and teacher, Yuknavitch has come to understand that by using the power of literature and storytelling to reframe her memories, she can loosen the bonds that have enslaved her emotional growth. Armed with this insight, she allows herself to look with the eye of an artist at the wounds she suffered and come to understand the transformational power this has to restore her soul.
By turns candid and lyrical, stoic and forgiving, blunt and evocative, Reading the Waves reframes memory to show how crucial this process can be to gaining a deeper understanding of ourselves.
224 pages, Hardcover
First published February 4, 2025
71 people are currently reading
3,927 people want to read
About the author
Lidia Yuknavitch
44 books2,322 followersLidia Yuknavitch is the author of the National Bestselling novels The Book of Joan and The Small Backs of Children, winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Award's Ken Kesey Award for Fiction as well as the Reader's Choice Award, and the novel Dora: A Headcase, Her widely acclaimed memoir The Chronology of Water was a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for creative nonfiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Award Reader's Choice. Her nonfiction book based on her TED Talk, The Misfit's Manifesto, is forthcoming from TED Books.
She founded the workshop series Corporeal Writing in Portland Oregon, where she teaches both in person and online. She received her doctorate in Literature from the University of Oregon. She lives in Oregon with her husband Andy Mingo and their renaissance man son, Miles. She is a very good swimmer.
She founded the workshop series Corporeal Writing in Portland Oregon, where she teaches both in person and online. She received her doctorate in Literature from the University of Oregon. She lives in Oregon with her husband Andy Mingo and their renaissance man son, Miles. She is a very good swimmer.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 36 reviews
August 20, 2024
I’m not sure how much more I can praise Lidia Yuknavitch. This was excellent. It felt like we picked right up where The Chronology of Water left off and continued to learn and grow. I will follow Lidia Yuknavitch to the ends of the earth, ends of a self, a new beginning, a new story.
February 2, 2025
The relationship between memory and story is something that’s always fascinated me; I have a terrible memory and also experience the world first through story. So, I was hooked from the beginning, which describes how memory is iterative and remembering is an act of storytelling—”Anything that can be put to story can be storied differently.” She pulls in threads from many other writers, including Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison, to describe how this book is a way of laying down memories that are too heavy to carry forward.
These are heavy stories. I want to give content warnings for suicide, the death of a child, child sexual assault, rape, murder, ableism, homophobia, parental abuse, and domestic violence. These are not mentioned in passing: the majority of the book is dealing with these topics, and I will be discussing them more in this review.
While the subject matter is dark, the beautiful writing kept me entirely engrossed. There are also fairy tale-like interludes that feel part fantasy, part memoir, part poetry. This is a story about running toward self-destruction, but it’s made easier to handle knowing that it’s written from a very different time in her life.
Full review at the Lesbrary.
These are heavy stories. I want to give content warnings for suicide, the death of a child, child sexual assault, rape, murder, ableism, homophobia, parental abuse, and domestic violence. These are not mentioned in passing: the majority of the book is dealing with these topics, and I will be discussing them more in this review.
While the subject matter is dark, the beautiful writing kept me entirely engrossed. There are also fairy tale-like interludes that feel part fantasy, part memoir, part poetry. This is a story about running toward self-destruction, but it’s made easier to handle knowing that it’s written from a very different time in her life.
Full review at the Lesbrary.
February 14, 2025
I held this book tightly after I finished. Beauty; simply beauty. 🩵🪶🐬
February 28, 2025
Conventional and non-conventional memoir fans, Lidia Yuknavitch.
Yuknavitch underscores how Reading the Waves isn’t a traditional memoir; rather, she reads (reveals to readers) and liberates fictitious stories lodged in her body. This literary release is a shape-shifting, narrative transmographic space. To be 100 with you, I’m not entirely sure what “narrative transmography” means for Yukavitch, but she wants to permit one’s mapping of experiences to move without erasing experiences. It sorta functions this way: Yukavitch returns to certain objective stand-out events in her life; in the act of inhabiting the stories in her mind, they shape her such that the memories’ subjective and fluid meanings evolve. The preface lays out Yuknavitch’s philosophy and methodology of writing about remembering. Is it a genre convention to lay out one’s approach to memoir-ing in the preface? Either Chihanya or Mlotek (or both) writes theirs out too in Bibliophobia and No Fault, respectively (I forget). I mention this because I finished their memoirs recently, and I think the throat-clearing is fine but unnecessary.
Whether or not I accurately grasped Yuknavitch’s modus operandi in theory, I really enjoyed Reading the Waves and it worked for me. Laden with groundedness, she shows readers why the experiences included in this compilation meaningfully shape her. Nothing feels disjointed (save for the last chapter, Solaces), which I thought might be the case, given her introductory remarks on the book’s genre. The writing is textured—she’s careful, abrasive, love-lorn, tender. The English language is Kinetic Sand in Yukavitch’s dexterous hands. I love it when authors unpretentiously remind me that verbs can be nominalized and nouns verbalized.
I also love when memoirs help me embody someone else’s narrative, take me deep into their mind’s nexus, show me how to sympathize with the author, and leave me feeling hopeful. Yuknavitch endures in spite of wading through intersections of death, and wonderfully, she normalizes sorrow, guiding readers to shed the bodies too. Moreover, even though loss dismantles, Yuknavitch pushes you to dive towards transformation because what’s ugly can be reshaped and emerge into something better, whether for us or those who come after. Yuknavitch seems to credit her mother, at least in part, who embodied grace in the face of violence and navigated life “with one leg six inches short than the other” (150). One of my favorite chapters is Monster because she honors her mom well.
Yuknavitch underscores how Reading the Waves isn’t a traditional memoir; rather, she reads (reveals to readers) and liberates fictitious stories lodged in her body. This literary release is a shape-shifting, narrative transmographic space. To be 100 with you, I’m not entirely sure what “narrative transmography” means for Yukavitch, but she wants to permit one’s mapping of experiences to move without erasing experiences. It sorta functions this way: Yukavitch returns to certain objective stand-out events in her life; in the act of inhabiting the stories in her mind, they shape her such that the memories’ subjective and fluid meanings evolve. The preface lays out Yuknavitch’s philosophy and methodology of writing about remembering. Is it a genre convention to lay out one’s approach to memoir-ing in the preface? Either Chihanya or Mlotek (or both) writes theirs out too in Bibliophobia and No Fault, respectively (I forget). I mention this because I finished their memoirs recently, and I think the throat-clearing is fine but unnecessary.
Whether or not I accurately grasped Yuknavitch’s modus operandi in theory, I really enjoyed Reading the Waves and it worked for me. Laden with groundedness, she shows readers why the experiences included in this compilation meaningfully shape her. Nothing feels disjointed (save for the last chapter, Solaces), which I thought might be the case, given her introductory remarks on the book’s genre. The writing is textured—she’s careful, abrasive, love-lorn, tender. The English language is Kinetic Sand in Yukavitch’s dexterous hands. I love it when authors unpretentiously remind me that verbs can be nominalized and nouns verbalized.
I also love when memoirs help me embody someone else’s narrative, take me deep into their mind’s nexus, show me how to sympathize with the author, and leave me feeling hopeful. Yuknavitch endures in spite of wading through intersections of death, and wonderfully, she normalizes sorrow, guiding readers to shed the bodies too. Moreover, even though loss dismantles, Yuknavitch pushes you to dive towards transformation because what’s ugly can be reshaped and emerge into something better, whether for us or those who come after. Yuknavitch seems to credit her mother, at least in part, who embodied grace in the face of violence and navigated life “with one leg six inches short than the other” (150). One of my favorite chapters is Monster because she honors her mom well.
March 8, 2025
She’s done it again—I love Lidia Yuknavitch so much. This book came through my life at the perfect time, and her discussion of the synthesis of fact and fiction really opened something for me. I love her brain.
February 25, 2025
Audiobook
March 3, 2025
I am have never read such a beautiful and heartening memoir. Thank you Lidia for shedding your skin and letting us in. Such beautiful wisdom and outlook through heartache and pain.
December 3, 2024
I received this book in a Goodreads Giveaway; my review is my own.
Lidia Yuknavitch bears her soul to us in "Reading the Waves." This moving book about grief, love, self, change, and healing is told through the lens of short stories. But unlike any other collection of stories I've ever read, "Reading the Waves" removes itself from space and time, overlapping the stories and spirits of the pages so you feel as though you've experienced one life-long chapter, as I'm sure Lidia felt when living it. "Reading the Waves" is a perfectly titled book; the messages she's guiding you to learn wash over you like a wave, retreat for a moment of clarity, then wash over you again in a new wave sometimes chapters later. Lidia's ability to call back moments well in the beginning of the book and remind you of things you almost forgot is exquisite. The cyclical and symbolic ways in which Lidia retells her own life makes you wonder if she really was born with a poetic fate meticulously scribed out in front of her. One of the smoothest rides of the soul and spirit I have ever had while reading - I did truly feel as though I was not Reading, but Riding the Waves of her storytelling. She guides you like a mother through her life, shows you your own life, and leaves you changed for the better.
I don't wish to open up the specific happenings of the book in this review, as I wish everyone to experience it exactly as I did going in blind to the plot. What's more, I truly don't think the exact events of the story matter. If you have grieved anything, if you have healed yourself, if you have healed others, if you have carried a burden longer than you should, if you have lost yourself in an identity you thought you needed to take on.... You will be moved by this book. I time and again found myself underlining passages that could not have been more applicable to my own grief and burdens.
This is my first read of Lidia's, and it will not be my last. I thank you for putting your beautiful, poetic life and pain into this art.
Lidia Yuknavitch bears her soul to us in "Reading the Waves." This moving book about grief, love, self, change, and healing is told through the lens of short stories. But unlike any other collection of stories I've ever read, "Reading the Waves" removes itself from space and time, overlapping the stories and spirits of the pages so you feel as though you've experienced one life-long chapter, as I'm sure Lidia felt when living it. "Reading the Waves" is a perfectly titled book; the messages she's guiding you to learn wash over you like a wave, retreat for a moment of clarity, then wash over you again in a new wave sometimes chapters later. Lidia's ability to call back moments well in the beginning of the book and remind you of things you almost forgot is exquisite. The cyclical and symbolic ways in which Lidia retells her own life makes you wonder if she really was born with a poetic fate meticulously scribed out in front of her. One of the smoothest rides of the soul and spirit I have ever had while reading - I did truly feel as though I was not Reading, but Riding the Waves of her storytelling. She guides you like a mother through her life, shows you your own life, and leaves you changed for the better.
I don't wish to open up the specific happenings of the book in this review, as I wish everyone to experience it exactly as I did going in blind to the plot. What's more, I truly don't think the exact events of the story matter. If you have grieved anything, if you have healed yourself, if you have healed others, if you have carried a burden longer than you should, if you have lost yourself in an identity you thought you needed to take on.... You will be moved by this book. I time and again found myself underlining passages that could not have been more applicable to my own grief and burdens.
This is my first read of Lidia's, and it will not be my last. I thank you for putting your beautiful, poetic life and pain into this art.
December 22, 2024
Like all literature, there are memorable moments within this piece. The author is able to vividly transport the reader to a time, place, and memory that is crucial to the author's childhood. Piecing together certain moments in childhood from adulthood, Yuknavitch accomplishes what the synopsis of this book mentions: "emotional growth." Like a wave, her writing takes over then leaves readers in a standstill in its aftermath. For readers who enjoy reading the full rollercoaster wave effect, I wouldn't recommend this book for you. If you're curious to know what new memoir genre is, then I'd recommend it for you though there are probably better books out there. Regardless, Yuknavitch has a great writing capacity and skill to hold readers in scenes rather than keeping them for the entirety.
October 27, 2024
A phenomenal "wemoir," as she classified it in a talk I attended last month. We are so blessed to be able to claim Lidia Yuknavitch as one of our own here in Oregon. What she has to share here is worth everybody's time.
Just a taste: "At what point can we tell the truth about how it really felt, without worrying about how it looks or sounds?"
I will keep returning to this book as long as I'm around.
Just a taste: "At what point can we tell the truth about how it really felt, without worrying about how it looks or sounds?"
I will keep returning to this book as long as I'm around.
Read
March 3, 2025It's hard to believe that it's been 14 years since THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER landed on my best books of the year list. Lidia Yuknavitch hardly has been idle since then. She has published novels and works of nonfiction, and has developed an innovative workshop practice for writers, visual artists and other creatives interested in exploring the interactions of the body and art. But even though it's been nearly a decade and a half since THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER, Yuknavitch's latest memoir feels in many ways like a companion to that other work, which echoes (or should I say ripples) through these pages. But READING THE WAVES more than stays afloat on its own merits.
Yuknavitch is in her early 60s now, so some of the work of this memoir is about the evolutions that accompany aging. Especially affecting are passages where she reflects on the wrenching mix of joy and loss she feels as her son, Miles, grows up and prepares to head to college. As their family visits the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, she observes Miles, who is 11 at the time:
“I stare at his back, his slightly awkward gait, the walk of a not-yet teen. A shock wave runs up my body from my vagina to my clavicle. Someday soon he is going to be walking away from us into his own life. Or, the walk away from us has already begun, just now. My son is a portal. He is stepping through into self. In some ways, I just want to lie down and die, sleep with the sleepers.”
This passage in some ways evokes much of what Yuknavitch is doing in READING THE WAVES. Wonder is twinned with despair; the body is intimately, viscerally entwined with both emotion and intellect; and death is never far away.
Yuknavitch's project in the book is gestured at by the four brilliant writers --- Jeanette Winterson, Clarice Lispector, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf --- whose words form the book's epigraphs. In THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER, Yuknavitch was writing about “embodied memory,” how “memory has no linear chronology or fixed note in time and space.” Now, years later, she acknowledges that our memories, our life stories, do take on lives both within and outside our bodies. If we pay attention, we can read them like actual stories.
“What if we could read our own past, our memories, even our bodies, as if they too were books open to endless interpretation? Endlessly generating and re-forming and showing us new insights?... Could I read my own past the way I read the books I love, with the same compassion, irritation, resistance, desire, playful transgression, erotics, joy, curiosity, and wonder that I bring to the books I love?”
Yuknavitch, of course, is not just a reader --- though her memoir is brimming with the words and inspiration of other authors --- she's also a writer. So when she approaches her own memories like a book, she's not just interpreting them; she’s narrating them and inviting us along for the ride. The memoir's structure is anchored by her reckoning with the death of her former lover, and her attempts to narrate his life and death outside of the very different narratives created by the police report of his death and the too-tidy, nearly generic obituary written by his family. But it also touches on many other traumas, including the violent death of her beloved older cousin and the tragic loss of her infant daughter, her own legacy of abuse, and the ways in which she has fought her way back to health, strength and joy through writing, art and sex.
Readers who have been following Yuknavitch's work for a long time will find READING THE WAVES especially rewarding, as they observe a writer growing into her own maturity in a spirit of acceptance without resignation. Newcomers also have much to savor here. They can use this powerful work as a jumping-off point into Yuknavitch's other writings, or simply be inspired by the list of challenges with which she closes the book, including: “You are never the same person twice; your story is ever-being. You are constantly changing, and that is everything.”
Reviewed by Norah Piehl
Yuknavitch is in her early 60s now, so some of the work of this memoir is about the evolutions that accompany aging. Especially affecting are passages where she reflects on the wrenching mix of joy and loss she feels as her son, Miles, grows up and prepares to head to college. As their family visits the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, she observes Miles, who is 11 at the time:
“I stare at his back, his slightly awkward gait, the walk of a not-yet teen. A shock wave runs up my body from my vagina to my clavicle. Someday soon he is going to be walking away from us into his own life. Or, the walk away from us has already begun, just now. My son is a portal. He is stepping through into self. In some ways, I just want to lie down and die, sleep with the sleepers.”
This passage in some ways evokes much of what Yuknavitch is doing in READING THE WAVES. Wonder is twinned with despair; the body is intimately, viscerally entwined with both emotion and intellect; and death is never far away.
Yuknavitch's project in the book is gestured at by the four brilliant writers --- Jeanette Winterson, Clarice Lispector, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf --- whose words form the book's epigraphs. In THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER, Yuknavitch was writing about “embodied memory,” how “memory has no linear chronology or fixed note in time and space.” Now, years later, she acknowledges that our memories, our life stories, do take on lives both within and outside our bodies. If we pay attention, we can read them like actual stories.
“What if we could read our own past, our memories, even our bodies, as if they too were books open to endless interpretation? Endlessly generating and re-forming and showing us new insights?... Could I read my own past the way I read the books I love, with the same compassion, irritation, resistance, desire, playful transgression, erotics, joy, curiosity, and wonder that I bring to the books I love?”
Yuknavitch, of course, is not just a reader --- though her memoir is brimming with the words and inspiration of other authors --- she's also a writer. So when she approaches her own memories like a book, she's not just interpreting them; she’s narrating them and inviting us along for the ride. The memoir's structure is anchored by her reckoning with the death of her former lover, and her attempts to narrate his life and death outside of the very different narratives created by the police report of his death and the too-tidy, nearly generic obituary written by his family. But it also touches on many other traumas, including the violent death of her beloved older cousin and the tragic loss of her infant daughter, her own legacy of abuse, and the ways in which she has fought her way back to health, strength and joy through writing, art and sex.
Readers who have been following Yuknavitch's work for a long time will find READING THE WAVES especially rewarding, as they observe a writer growing into her own maturity in a spirit of acceptance without resignation. Newcomers also have much to savor here. They can use this powerful work as a jumping-off point into Yuknavitch's other writings, or simply be inspired by the list of challenges with which she closes the book, including: “You are never the same person twice; your story is ever-being. You are constantly changing, and that is everything.”
Reviewed by Norah Piehl
February 5, 2025
I listened to Lidia Yuknavitch's Reading the Waves all day. 4:30 am-3:44 pm (it’s only 7 hours on audio but life). I wrote on the calendar, “Working out of the house all day,” and listened while I walked the dogs, while I ate breakfast, listened while driving, drove slow, listened at the nursery, listened planting food and ferns and rain lilies. I couldn’t turn away today. I couldn’t stop listening. That is generally how I feel reading anything she writes, but when she’s writing about memory and sister love and mother love and daughter love and building a family out in the forest love: I don’t know how anyone can turn away. The way she is in conversation with these stories she has been telling herself for decades is so relieving, refreshing, sigh-worthy.
Lidia speaks joy love language like someone who fully understands death language. She shows us how you can carry death story and how those stories can change every time you swim them. What does it mean for a story to be over? For a love story to end? As usual, spending time in Lidia’s art realms suspends beginnings and endings and time to focus the lens on how the body feels in those moments of love and how those feelings keep us moving through story long after the concepts of beginning and end fall out of the frame.
I loved how she wrote about the Valkyrie, Andy and mushrooms, Olga in the forest, her love for her son in all its wonder and awe and transitions, the photographer, Devin: in conversation, out of time, supernova of love. Lidia is brilliant as ever: all hail and swoon.
Lidia speaks joy love language like someone who fully understands death language. She shows us how you can carry death story and how those stories can change every time you swim them. What does it mean for a story to be over? For a love story to end? As usual, spending time in Lidia’s art realms suspends beginnings and endings and time to focus the lens on how the body feels in those moments of love and how those feelings keep us moving through story long after the concepts of beginning and end fall out of the frame.
I loved how she wrote about the Valkyrie, Andy and mushrooms, Olga in the forest, her love for her son in all its wonder and awe and transitions, the photographer, Devin: in conversation, out of time, supernova of love. Lidia is brilliant as ever: all hail and swoon.
February 15, 2025
The long-awaited 2nd memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch, whose 2011 memoir, The Chronology of Water, built her a very large and devoted following. It would not be hyperbole to say that Lidia is a hero to many and sort of a guru to many misfit writers and artists.
Reading the Waves is a beautiful, gripping, and emotional memoir that mostly explores Lidia's journeys through her twenties and beyond, with a focus on lost loves, most notably her second husband, Devin Crowe, whose cause of death in 2015 is undetermined (a fall from a crane that was either suicide or an accident). With a life full of vulnerable experiences, Lidia's forgiving clarity and strong wisdom propel the book with a sense of urgency. The chapters here can sometimes read like stand-alone essays but they do stitch together to make a whole. The writing feels wider and more fleshed out than the raw, fragmented style of her first memoir–a clear sign of a writer who has sharpened and seasoned her skills through fiction writing in the years since. For her to dive back into nonfiction waters now makes her personal soul baring even more charged. This book ranks up there with her best.
Reading the Waves is a beautiful, gripping, and emotional memoir that mostly explores Lidia's journeys through her twenties and beyond, with a focus on lost loves, most notably her second husband, Devin Crowe, whose cause of death in 2015 is undetermined (a fall from a crane that was either suicide or an accident). With a life full of vulnerable experiences, Lidia's forgiving clarity and strong wisdom propel the book with a sense of urgency. The chapters here can sometimes read like stand-alone essays but they do stitch together to make a whole. The writing feels wider and more fleshed out than the raw, fragmented style of her first memoir–a clear sign of a writer who has sharpened and seasoned her skills through fiction writing in the years since. For her to dive back into nonfiction waters now makes her personal soul baring even more charged. This book ranks up there with her best.
February 8, 2025
I have just finished this wonderful novel by Lidia Yuknavitch , “Reading the Waves”. Yuknavitch has a talent with words that is, frankly, magical. You think you are reading a regular book and before long, if you are wise enough to surrender to it, you can tap into the fluidity of her nature in this telling and ride it on through adventuring with her. Unlike magic, there is nature within this story with breathtaking beauty along with the startling reality and teeth of the wild. Yuknavitch captures this with her amazing skill with words and we are fortunate that she shares this with us. I pre-ordered this book in anticipation. While I was waiting for the book to arrive, I snapped up the audio rendition from the library. I would suggest that ideally one should read the hard copy while listening to the audio. Lidia reads this book aloud with what I can only describe as a fierce frailty that adds a dimension to the entire work. Her voice is like a butterfly caught in the maw of a great beast and is a perfect enhancement to her work in print. Highly recommend.
February 12, 2025
Lidia Yuknavitch’s “The Chronology of Water” was a life-changing book for me. It was the first book I read by her, and I read some of her fiction afterwards but was never quite as captured as I had been by the initial non-fiction. This new book of non-fiction offers more of the kind of Yuknavitch’s writing that resonates with me: in fluid, vulnerable, poetic prose, Yuknavitch offers interwoven stories of family, love, grief, trauma, writing. Her voice feels specific & unique, writing against—or just without a care for—conventions, skillfully. Every word drips with the body, which is especially poignant for writing about trauma. I’d just read Peter Levine’s “Waking the Tiger” before this and felt those two reads actually went together quite well. I listened to the audiobook and enjoyed hearing the author read this herself.
February 10, 2025
Reading the Waves is an act of generosity from one of the tenderest hearts, one of the most cosmic, formshifting writers of our time. The stories, the water, the brutality, the grief, the love, it’s all there. I was gifted the book and I purchased the audio. Hearing these words in her own voice felt like being with a good friend, with someone who gets it. Her vulnerability takes my breath away. The way she describes the deep emotions, the subtleties of knowing/feeling is masterful. Lidia’s message at the end is a strong one, shifting the focus back to the reader, encouraging, bolstering, cheering, loving. It will be a book I read again, listen to again.
February 8, 2025
Fans of Yuknavitch's work--especially her magnificent memoir 'The Chronology of Water'--will be delighted by this excellent companion piece. In beautiful, heartbreaking prose, so distinctly her own, she explores the interrelationships of body, memory and the stories we tell to ascribe meaning to our lives.
March 3, 2025
Some books feel so personal it's hard to even know how to share or recommend them. This one was written straight to my soul at this particular time. It's a strange response, maybe, but I barely even want to share this. (If you've ever read anything by Lidia Yuknavitch you already know you should read this.)
March 6, 2025
We search in books for truth- thank you for such a celebration of art, heart, life, and death. Thank you for exploring your self and your past selves and sharing your discoveries so we too could ask good questions and inquiries. Your writing truly offers us portals. I am grateful for your wisdom and the love you found in fire.
March 7, 2025
Like Poetry
Lidia’s writing is so poetic no matter the subject or event she’s writing about. She brought me through this story to a prayer-like mindfulness with the wisdom of her soul that truly comprises earth and cosmos. I don’t mean to sound sappy, but her talent truly reveals what most others might consider an otherworldliness and brings it to us as the more authentic way.
Lidia’s writing is so poetic no matter the subject or event she’s writing about. She brought me through this story to a prayer-like mindfulness with the wisdom of her soul that truly comprises earth and cosmos. I don’t mean to sound sappy, but her talent truly reveals what most others might consider an otherworldliness and brings it to us as the more authentic way.
March 7, 2025
I needed this book. I loved how it was put together, braided, collaged, and I loved being in the story journey - not lost but present, without expectation, for where it took me. I laughed out loud. I cried. This book is the power of love, the shapeshiftingness of it, the transformative and transmutational effect of it. It is sorrow joy, a conjuring.
October 15, 2024
Full review to come. I do feel like it was excessively sexual at times and that took away from my rating.
I know it’s probably a controversial thought. Should a writer edit their own memoir to appeal to the reader? In this case, I would have to say yes.
I know it’s probably a controversial thought. Should a writer edit their own memoir to appeal to the reader? In this case, I would have to say yes.
February 16, 2025
Yuknavitch has a beautiful lyric voice. But somehow I was impatient for the book to end. It was fascinating in parts, grandiose at times, and somehow both incomplete and overwritten. But I'm not sorry I read it. It felt sometimes like there was a woman bleeding in my kitchen.
September 26, 2024
Lidia's words are candid and offer a glimpse on how we can turn pain into beauty.
February 7, 2025
Holy hell, she does it again.
February 10, 2025
Queen Lidia Yuknavitch. That is all. No notes.
February 15, 2025
Too frank, I got lost.
February 26, 2025
I’m forever grateful for a voice like Lydia’s that can tell her story in such a way that makes you whole even when it rips you apart.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 36 reviews
