This Modern Writer: Ideas of Order in Chronology by Nathan Huffstutter

Trust me on this: you’re going to read The Chronology of Water. Superlatives in its reviews will scratch where you itch, discussions in lit forums will demand your engagement, someone will press a copy into your hands. Here, read this. No hyperbole, Lidia Yuknavitch builds her memoir through such shit-hot compelling prose the book will literally gush from reader to reader to reader.

In engaging the novel, though, amid the pain, the revelation, all that shit-hot prose, something disturbing started to sink in. Not like Last Exit to Brooklyn disturbing, but disturbing in my own disordered emotional response. Tossing and turning at night, my daily writing schedule upended, I may have even forgot to feed my kids a meal or two. By now, I’m able to diagnose this unease – it’s how my psyche kicks back when I’m being manipulated. For in this memoir, the author’s truth is the card sharper’s truth, Ms. Yuknavitch is the pro who tells you she’s going to take all your money, then sits down and proceeds to do just that.

Don’t say you weren’t warned: it’s right there in the epigraph, Emily Dickinson’s familiar quote, tell all the truth but tell it slant. And anyone who knows the angles will tell you, rather than stacking whopper on top of whopper, the mightiest fictions are built on the careful ordering of truth.

Again, don’t say you weren’t warned. Ms. Yuknavitch goes on to preface her narrative with the following artful fib:

“I remember things in retinal flashes. Without order. Your life doesn’t happen in any kind of order.”

Easy to swallow, the author has just earned every drop of our empathy with a tour-de-force opening, recounting the birth of her stillborn daughter. And if that’s not enough, honestly, who the hell are we to question the processes of another person’s memory? As the work unfolds, though, these retinal flashes don’t occur at random, this is not Beckett’s stream of conscious, with the dead-ends, the detritus, the mundane. No, Ms. Yukavitch’s “memory” is that of a P.H.D. in Literature, one who knows structure at the cellular level. It is the memory of an extraordinarily talented novelist, one who sees the order of things and knows how to stack the deck.

Start at the beginning, which is not actually the beginning, but the moment Ms. Yuknovich chooses as her point of entry. A daughter stillborn, a grief so tangibly rendered that fellow writers will immediately think very critically of entry points in their own fiction. Hooked. Fortuitously, the chaos of her memory begins here, at an opening that’s absolute fucking aces. And it would be easy to say catch a clue, bozo, this is the defining moment in the author’s adult life. But that wouldn’t be true, the patterns of her adult life, the events ordered in this narrative, these were not carved by this grief but born of a sadistic father and a mother too wedded to harm to protect her offspring from it.

So the question becomes whether the author has ordered her scenes to illuminate truths about the living and life itself, or if she is instead pursuing the maximum emotional impact. And if so, how do we engage this as an art? When the memoir has reached a sort of denouement and the white lie of the retinal flashes has outlived it’s usefulness, Ms. Yuknavitch tips her hand:

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

Back to her opening sequence. If there truly was a random element in her memory, how would this same scene play if her retinal flashes had, say, juxtaposed it alongside the frank admission she’d had three abortions before the age of 21? Should that matter the slightest fucking bit? It’s a loaded and cynical issue, but the cynicism doesn’t rise from the raising, it is, first and foremost, in the order of things. A mother’s grief cannot be qualified, it cannot be denied, forget an aggressive sexual history, forget past pregnancies, but the close reader has to go beyond their immediate emotional response and wonder how much the author is, in fact, merely creating a fiction she can live with.

This is Ms. Yuknavitch’s story, and if she chooses to structure her fragments as a hero’s journey, that’s her business. But among writers, and this is a book writers will gravitate toward, there’s a far more vexing issue, that of a memoirist’s responsibility toward their supporting cast. Throughout the narrative of Chronology, this relates not just to the ordering of things, but the ordering of absence, as, tellingly, the author withholds virtually all specific detail relative to the abuse she and her sister endured. Of her sister:

“I’d tell you how her colon was irrevocably messed up – how, as a child I sat with her and held her hand every time she tried to poo. How she squeezed my little girl hand so tight I thought it might be crushed.”

In fiction, this is what we call a masterstroke. Two sentences doing the heavily lifting of hundreds. Ms. Yuknavitch justifies this type of tactic in the text, offering the caveat that “events don’t have cause and effect relationships the way you wish they did.”

Cause: we are presented the image of a young girl on the toilet, her colon so compromised as to turn simple bodily functions into torture.

Effect: the mind reels, it’s capable of terrible atrocities, imaging an anus breached by an entire host of foreign objects, none of which have any business being there.

Conjuring this scene, the author presents an effect, the reader imagines the cause, a relationship is forged. Only this relationship may not bear even a passing resemblance to any true event. As an author, particularly when narrating scenes you were not a party to, do you owe your characters a more objective level of truth, one that’s above artifice?

In the ordering of Chronology, similar absences riddle the narrative. Ms. Yuknavitch candidly admits punching her passive, gentle, gorgeous husband Phillip in the face, but moves to the next image without granting him the generosity of a response. She and her sister flee the terror of their home life, only her (estranged?) parents consistently materialize at births and deaths and weddings, clearly not out of the blue, but all the awkward, banal, connective smalltalk has been whitewashed from the heroic narrative. This ordering even supercedes geography: her sister plays a dramatic role in the abuse narrative and a maternal role in the grief narrative, but during the narrative of the author’s redemption through letters, even though she and her sister were presumably based at the same University for at least a decade, for unexplained reasons, her sibling ceases to exist in the world of the story.

In this overall structure, moving from grief to redemption, we are given fistings and fisticuffs, needles and the damage done. To herself. As the author allows us to see it. But whenever that damage spills to those around her, Ms. Yuknavitch reels the focus back to her hero. One pathology of the abuser, in their mind, the victim’s pain ceases to exist beyond the immediacy of their violence. The abuser does not see how deep their violence runs, they cannot see it switch back, they ignore how their rage erodes and erodes the soul of their victims. The pregnant woman Lidia hits in an alcohol-fueled car crash? The wife of the student she falls madly in love with? The gentle husband she punched in the face? After the dramatic event, their lives, their pain, any empathetic aftereffect is entirely marginalized, ordered completely out of the narrative. The cycle of abuse is a motherfucker.

I still have more questions than answers, but this much I will say – take your seat at the table, it’s worth the show. And when Ms. Yuknavitch antees with Dickinson, I’ll call with Stevens.

“She was the single artificer of the world

In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,

Whatever self it had, became the self

That was her song, for she was the maker.”