Lidia Yuknavitch's The Chronology of Water: A Review by Dawn West

Posted on by
I am not what people mean when they say good woman. By people, I mean the good Christian kind. Sarah Palin calls them real Americans. I have lied (especially to hide) and cheated (twice). I smoke and swear and drink. I’m not heterosexual or white or wealthy. I swim through storms of anxiety and cruel shifts of mood. I have broken a small number of American laws. I have let men do things because I was terrified or because I wanted to become that thing they thought I was or just because a teenage girl’s body is a minefield. I am not what people mean when they say good woman. This is something Lidia Yuknavitch and I have in common. This is the smaller reason why I’m in shameless wasps-in-my-stomach fuck-I-need-a-cigarette brain love with her.

And this brain love is brand spanking new. Seeing the cover of The Chronology of Water here is the first time I ever saw her name. The Chronology of Water is the kind of book that makes you want to hug it to your heart, kiss its cover, run your fingertips over the edge of each page. Let me tell you: this is one fucking high quality paperback. Hawthorne Books should be commended for providing such delightfully sensual casing for Yuknavitch’s hellish, hypnotic prose.

Yuknavitch has this uncanny ability of making me feel like she’s reaching out of the book and past my skin and into my ribcage and then there’s her fist around my heart, synchronizing my pulse with the pace of her prose. It’s cutthroat, nonlinear, distilled and expanded at will, like human memory. The way our minds collect and remake memories is fascinating, and Yuknavitch’s memoir explores this extensively.

I thought about starting this book with my childhood, the beginning of my life. But that’s not how I remember it. I remember things in retinal flashes. Without order. Your life doesn’t happen in any kind of order. Events don’t have cause and effect relationships the way you wish they did. It’s all a series of fragments and repetitions and pattern formations. Language and water have this in common.

The driving metaphor of this book works beautifully: the way we are made of water, can be unmade by water, the way our lives move in fits and starts, in days curling and unraveling like waves. Yuknavitch’s life as a swimmer, as a survivor, as a woman in the world, is relayed in this way.

The way she plays with language like a diver swimming among a school of koi could be called experimental, but I’ve never been a big fan of that term. I enjoy Amelia Gray’s recent definition of experimental writing as a reaction to something, so in that sense I would call The Chronology of Water an experimental memoir. Her chapter “Distilled”, a breathless, ball-busting summary of her second marriage, is a particularly evocative example of this.

It’s hard for me to critique a memoir, because it feels as if I’m reviewing a person and the way they’ve lived their life. I can’t help feeling this way, but this fear is ultimately false. A memoir is an object, something in the realm of truth but ultimately a controlled work of art. This is what Yuknavitch wants you to know, and how she wants you to know it. The sexual and physical abuse she endured at the hands of her father is known, but no gratuitous details are given—there is the simple truth, and with Yuknavitch, that is more than enough to grip the reader’s heart. This is her life transformed, like my life is when I talk about it, like your life is when you tell a story to your lover, to a friend, to a leaf of paper or a word processor. We are all composing our lives are we remember them. Yuknavitch is simply an exemplary composer.

Yuknavitch takes the reader on a heart-smashing journey through a menagerie of memories, starting with the birth of her stillborn daughter before taking us on a series of laps through her complex, dark, frightening, beautiful life. The reader is intimately aware of the body, her body, and what bodies go through. The blood, the cum, the piss, the shit, the snot, the skin, the injuries and healing and loving and destroying and dying. She will not let us forget that bodies do die. We are holy and wholly vulnerable. Even writing is relayed as a physical act, a clit-hardening passion from the brain and through the hands and pulse, pulse, pulse in the meat of a single heart.

My first book came out of me in a great gushing return of the repressed. Like a blood clot had loosened. My hands frenzied. Words came from my whole body, my entire life, or the lives of women and girls whose stories got stuck in their throats came gushing out. Nothing could have stopped the stories coming out of me. Even though my hands and arms and face hurt—bruised and cut from falling from a train—or a marriage—or a self in the night—I wrote story after story. There was no inside out. There were words and there was my body, and I could see through my own skin. I wrote my guts out. Until it was a book. Until my very skin made screamsong.

I say, goddamn.
I know why Yuknavitch says that writing saved her. This is not a naïve statement or false sentiment. Writing is her lifeblood. Screamsong. A word I want tattooed on me now. The Chronology of Water is a vital book—a book that will be, as Kafka famously demanded, the axe for the frozen sea within you.

The Chronology of Water is published by Hawthorne Books.

—

Dawn West (b. 1987) reads, writes, and eats falafel in Ohio.