The Chronology of Water: A Memoir

The writer is clearly talented but frankly I tire of "revenge" memoirs that take on folks (usually parents) who are no longer here to defend themselves. This writer seems to make being a "victim" a career, which she disguises as being quirky. I completed the book, because I'm interested in memoir writing, but should have spent my time (and money) on something else.

The writing was good in places, but I stopped reading after she gets so drunk that she has a head-on collision and almost kills a pregnant woman. She does this because her ex-husband said something fairly mundane that upset her. I have zero-tolerance for drunk drivers, especially unapologetic ones.

Yukavitch's writing is bracing, profane, inventive, funny and compelling. As the pages pile up, though, Yukavitch's self-obsession grows tiresome and almost repellent. Because her own childhood was so traumatic, she seems to feel that she's entitled to act out in ways that hurt other people and that her blistering honesty somehow absolves her from blame. Disturbing.

The author is a sophisticated prose stylist whose personal story is a journey through child abuse and addiction. She seems to know that this story is so common and so predictable in its manifestations, that she chooses to write around it and glam up her experience with some dazzling prose. This is, at heart, a diversionary tactic that masks the mundane and predictable nature of her journey. I almost stopped reading the book in the middle because she was so stuck in sameness in both her prose and her storyline. She does, however, in the final third of the book, pull it - and herself - out of the crapper.

Obviously, this book is highly regarded by many. Some of them are literature instructors who love the stylistic means used to simulate the mindset of the author at various times of her life, others are promiscuous in their compassion and flock to a person with so much suffering in the first (and accessible) few pages. Still others praise the boldness with which the author displayed a nipple, used obscenities, and badmouthed any authority figure who had to interact with (see her time at the university for examples).

As should be obvious by now, she is an extremely dysfunctional and maladaptive person. That she was reportedly sexually abused by her father does not change the horrible behavior she engaged in later. She engaged in rampant drug use in high-school, college, after flunking out of college, and bitterly resented the people at the rehab centers she had to go to. Alcohol abuse was likewise severe including a drunk driving accident involving hitting a pregnant woman. She pressured her overly meek boyfriend to break into people's houses, have sex in their rooms, steal alcohol, drugs, and even hit him at least once. Her promiscuity began by high-school where she was deeply disappointed that a homosexual boy wouldn't sleep with her. She also had three abortions (the other reviewer was off by one) but she only talks about the miscarriage in detail and regret(to the massive sympathy of many reviewers).

Her dysfunctional life saw her kicked out of college as she went from strong high-school athletic swimmer to flabby druggie who failed a competition because she was high. As a grad student, she sleep with three professors. As a professor, she slept with her grad student (and ended up marrying him). Of more worry than the drug use is her lack of respect for other people. That is the most common threat running though the entire book and the most disturbing. Her entire pattern of behavior gives off a narcissistic personality disorder vibe with strong undertones of serial killer. For those who try to say that her sexual abuse caused PTSD that in turn caused her to engage in such horrible behavior, PTSD doesn't work that way. We human beings still have free will and moral agency.

As a literary work, she comes from a school of though that argues written obscenities and the grossness of the worst of life are more real than the good, clean or orderly. She managed to write in a tone mimicking her emotional and intellectual state at various times in her life but had refused to write her memoir chronologically. All one gets (until the very end) is a series of mostly disconnected scenes without the context to allow the reader to evaluate the full meaning of them.

She spends her time feeling sorry for herself having learned little from her self-inflicted odyssey of short-term pleasure and long-term misery. She even pretends to have been mistreated when the University she taught at fired her for sleeping with her student. Eventually, in something akin to a happy ending, she married an (apparently) decent man, had a child, and has a respectable job. Her saying her son looks like a retard is a worrying note.

All that indicates something, the reader definitely connects with the author. In my case, reading the book was horrendously painful as I stared into the face of dysfunction and saw a person. The organization and language are obscene but attractive to a certain school of literary thought. If you are a literature instructor, please do not inflict this on your class. If you are a person of unquestioning sympathy, you will enjoy the book. For the eternal cynic and skeptics, stay away.

Foul language and unresolved personal issue that the author never accepts any responsibility for. She insuates a lot in this book, mostly about her father. I to had a father who served in Korea. And he was abusive. But if I wrote about it, I would not weaken the language and the story with insinuations. She insuitas that her oldest sister was molested in the middle of a blinding snow storm during a family trip to the woods to get a Christmas tree, while her mother waited in the car. I doubt that her sister was abused in that moment. She blames her father for crashing a bike she was supposed to control, "But let go of the handle bars while going down a steep hill." Many of us learned to ride a bike from our fathers and trial and error. She never thanks her parents for the things they gave up so she could blow a swimming scholarship, and become a party girl.

Beyond its clear, dazzling lyrical passages, beyond its fierce energy and unending optimism, there is so much to say about this confessional, bravely written memoir, and you can be sure that The Chronology of Water is an important book. Its themes -- womanhood, motherhood, stillbirth, women's reproductive rights, bisexuality, love and fatherhood, promiscuity and sexual violence, drug and alcohol abuse, sorrow and grief, hope, and survival -- are cultural and political talking points, significant because these issues ought to be discussed and must be heard. That Lidia Yuknavitch is brave enough to begin these discussions with her readers is well worth applauding, and I think it would be a shame and an oversight to think anything less of the importance, and relevance, of this book.

The author may be stunningly descriptive in her style of writing, but was I really supposed to believe that moving to a house in the country and having a baby is the cure for alcoholism and sex addiction?

I applaud the authors bravery in "laying it all out there". It is a visceral story written with a compelling voice. This book containes graphic, violent sex and disturbing content matter. . Not a book for the faint of heart or a in my opionion, a young reader.

Have you ever met a drunk before? What about someone who likes drugs? What about someone who screws anything on two legs? What about someone who is all three of these things and thinks this makes them REMARKABLY fascinating, edgy, and exotic? Now add a heaping helping of unhappy childhood, a sprinkling of ex-husbands, some chlorinated pool water, some celebrity name dropping, the most uninspired introduction imaginable, and regurgitate it all back up in a writing style which is wannabe Burroughs and Acker, and you've got an idea of what you're in for here, which is boring, boring, boring, as boring as a depressed/narcissistic 17 year old's diary, as boring as one of those drunk prattlers [you know the type] who insist on yammering incessantly about that time when oh man I was sooo wasted..., as boring and as self important as any English lit grad student who ever squinted down at a page of Roland Barthes, as boring as a big, steaming pile of EGO floating on a urine-warm pool of stale beer and pubic hair, and as boring as the tired belief that it is somehow revolutionary to try to shock the bourgeoisie by waving a dead fetus at them.

PEEWEE's PLAYHOUSE ON FAST FORWARD.

Bit and pieces of it are real, but 95% of it seems like a coherent manic episode, and such experiences don't exist, plus she's chronicling plenty where she was intoxicated. Sex isn't as she depicts it, and what she wrote reminds me of Casanova's caveat about sex: IMAGINATION IS BETTER THAN DESCRIPTION. Lidia's descriptions got away from her. But she writes well.

Warning- This book is NOT for everyone.
If you are predisposed to viewing the world/life as right/wrong, good/bad etc, I recommend skipping this one. This is not for the feint of heart nor for those who have lived fairly normal, average, 'happy' lives. Though, I will dare say, that if each life were to be truly put through a sieve or a microscope there is NO life truly normal, average. Normal is an illusion derived from getting averages of the extreme.

What did I love about this book? From the onset, the writing gripped my attention. It kept me there throughout bec of how it managed to share the messy 'wrongness and ugliness' of life in a way which is breathtakingly beautiful. Is that not the paradox and mystery, beauty and debauchery that ALL of life, pulled together, is?

There are no excuses for any aspect of it from her. There is just the telling of what is or what was in her eyes, in her body, in her heart. I make no judgments of Lidia's life. There are reviews here that question the truth of this actually being her life. If it helps some, the author repeatedly says, in not so many words, that science has said that as soon as something is told from memory it changes. It no longer is genuinely what it was/is in the process of looking and telling.

Personally and up until recently, I have always been drawn more towards the 'pretty telling' of tales. Of late though, I have often wondered about how much of the trivialities of life, of the human body, of its desires and how it responds to it are NOT told. Maybe my own keen awareness and acceptance of my life being not average, or that there are plenty of moments in it which would be called unacceptable, unlovable, all the "UN-" things. The personal & spiritual journey has been an understanding that it's all just simply Life being lived through this body, nothing personal and nothing special. Coming from this perspective, what looks disturbed, selfish, self-absorbed, narcissistic etc. of Lidia's life and choices, of her mother's or her father's therefore comes across to me as being whole and fitting in the scheme of Life.

There were parts which I found a bit challenging to 'get'. Partly because of the way it was written, I think. Not a fault of the writer and I suspect, given a second reading and a little bit more presence, would feel its meaning that was lost on me. Some reviews accuse the author of being a name dropper. I instead found the names useful for researching the context of how she writes. It also served to address my wondering on who inspired her. Some disparage her writing style as high school level and/or no better than blogging. Perhaps this can also mean her work is very current, relatable and meaningful.

At the heart of it, what had me commit my dollars into buying this in Word Bookstore when I could've purchased it on my Kindle like I normally do (would've saved a few $) is the power and eloquence of her writing. The juxtaposition of the dreamlike aspects of her memoir against the hard, harsh edges of her life make for a very fascinating and thought-provoking panorama to view my own life against.

Highly recommended (for those who can reserve judgment).

Yuknavitch has the most unique, poetic style of writing. In an interview with publisher and editor Rhonda Hughes, Yuknavitch said, “You could probably go through this book and literally chart the moments of emotional intensity by watching where the language—to quote Dickinson—goes strange.” This, along with the non-linear structure of the story, almost make the memoir seem experimental. But the way she composes the book is quite political. She writes about sexual abuse, but vaguely. She writes about her alcohol and drug use, but vaguely. Perhaps she is trying to avoid the injustice of her story being called cliché by writing it with ambiguity. But perhaps this vagueness could also make her story into anybody’s story. Maybe that’s what makes it so powerful.

One thing that soured the experience a bit for me as a black reader, was the fact that, apparently, every person Yuknavitch has ever met is glaringly pink nippled and pearly skinned. The only people of color mentioned are, of course, the black and Hispanic prison-goers she does community service with. It's a little disappointing that Yuknavitch, who speaks from such an empowered female perspective, didn't think that her portrayal of race was important in the memoir.

Nevertheless, The Chronology of Water is a beautiful and inspiring read from a woman who presents herself as deeply human. We see her flaws, and we let them go, because they’re okay. Flaws are human, and this book does not apologize for that. After closing it, I felt I could forgive myself a little more, cry for the tragedies, and appreciate the crazy, chaotic mosaic of life.

The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch is a breathtaking, shocking memoir exploring issues of gender, sexuality, violence, and the family from the point of view of a lifelong swimmer turned artist. Not for everyone. Her writing is experimental, mind-blowingly creative, writing that explores the nature of memoir itself.

"The Chronology of Water" is an amazing memoir that's written in the style of a person's memory, which is one of the things I love most about it. This is a brutally honest and candid depiction of a woman's life spiraling out of control and then eventually finding meaningful purpose and direction. Mind you, she is (admittedly) a very flawed woman who has led a very messed-up life, and this book is incredibly brutal in its descriptions of pain, addiction, abuse, and sex (lots and lots and lots of sex). It wasn't a quick read: I found myself needing to put it down many times so I could sit back and process everything I had just read. This is one of the most enjoyable books I've read in a while.

This book upended my expectations and made me fall in love with language all over again. Yuknavitch's writing, her story, and her compassion feel absolutely vital. I am grateful to have found this book when I did.

What a ride our life, love, and production of art can be.

This is a powerfully graphic glimpse of rapids and depth and shallow coolness of life waters. I found it difficult to "sell" this book to others yet with each page being devoured I felt the need to share it with others.

Like an unfamiliar dessert made of ingredients I can't pronounce... this book has me interrupting others at other tables offering them a fork full. This journey is an honest open share that heals each reader.

Addiction to the usual as well as desperate loneliness and self doubt, sex to feel and sex to go numb, and the creation of life to the birth of death... you will find yourself in this babbling brook. Like water, you won't be able to hold it yet are forever changed, cleaned, soiled, made still.

Thank you for the ride. I implore you... please read.

Jessica Pettitt. Jessica Pettitt is the "diversity educator" your family warned you about. Through teaching, writing, and facilitating tough conversations, she has figured out how to BE the change she wants to BE. Now it is your turn!
As she travels around the country, you can catch up with Jessica on:

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Exquisite, raw, poetic. The last few pages had me holding my breath, waiting. I sensed there was something to be unwrapped, discovered. Something that would be simple, yet profound. Something that would reveal more of myself to me. Lidia did not disappoint. I felt like she reached through her pages and her words and touched my heart in a way no other writer has ever done. Like so many others, I will be returning to this memoir, like someone returning to a well, to draw from it again and again - to keep my writer self watered, refreshed and inspired to continue to write.

because I honestly wanted it to keep going. I read Dora over the course of a day and didn't even know about this book until I saw LIdia read in town recently and heard someone talking about it. I love the honestly that Lidia writes. She is such a strong force of a person and her spirit and courage run throughout the book. I found myself cracking up a number of times, especially when she described meeting and dating her husband Andy, who sounds like he would be a memoir candidate as well.

Maybe i'm biased cause I liked Dora so much and i'm from Portland, but I instantly recommended this book to a couple of friends who I think would appreciate what was found in these pages.

I've never written a review before, but this book moved me profoundly. It is one of the most powerful demonstrations of the craft of writing that I have ever encountered. I think you will find it to be one of the truest memoirs you've ever read. She tells us exactly what made her who she is, good and bad. When you finish this book you will know her life.

If you are not comfortable with explicit sexuality you should avoid this book. No judgement, it's just that the sexuality is integral to the story, and if that makes you uncomfortable you should not even start reading it.

There were passages in this book that literally took my breath away. Not for the faint of heart, Yuknavitch masterfully manages to forge completely new ground by merging language and syntax with emotion, conveying the courage its taken to live, and survive, her life. While she was the victim of a difficult family situation, she pulls no punches in owning that she created much of what she had to survive, but her path through that is stunningly told. And while one reviewer says that there's no redemption in her story, I disagree -- I think one of the things that makes it so compelling is the fact that she was able to emerge intact and loving after embracing virtually every form of self-destructive behavior possible.

Thank you for this amazing gift, Lidia.

(This review was originally published at The Nervous Breakdown)

"Given a choice between grief and nothing, I choose grief."
--William Faulkner

I wasn't prepared for this memoir, this baptism by fire that Lidia Yuknavitch pours out onto the pages of The Chronology of Water (Hawthorne Books). I was aware of the controversy about the exposed breast on the cover, the grey band of paper wrapped around the book to appease those who can't stand to see such obscenity. I was lured in by the glowing testimonials of authors I know and respect, people like Chuck Palahniuk, Monica Drake, and Chelsea Cain (who writes the introduction), her close-knit group of fellow authors, her workshop, support group, therapy and champions. But no, I wasn't prepared for her voice--the power, the lyrical passages, and the raw, crippling events that destroyed her youth, but made her the woman she is today: fearless, funny, honest, and kind. By not being prepared, the opening lines hit me hard, and I in fact stopped for a moment, realizing that this was going to be bumpy ride, a dark story, but one that held nothing back. So I took a breath, and I went under:

"The day my daughter was stillborn, after I held the future pink and rose-lipped in my shivering arms, lifeless tender, covering her face in tears and kisses, after they handed my dead girl to my sister who kissed her, then to my first husband who kissed her, then to my mother who could not bear to hold her, then out of the hospital room door, tiny lifeless swaddled thing, the nurse gave me tranquilizers and a soap and sponge. She guided me to a special shower. The shower had a chair and the spray came down lightly, warm. She said, That feels good, doesn't it. The water. She said, you are still bleeding quite a bit. Just let it. Ripped from vagina to rectum, sewn closed. Falling water on a body."

I am a father, but I am not a mother. I know the difference. I was there when my twins were born, my boy and my girl pulled out into the harsh lights of the sterile, cold hospital room. I watched them cut my wife open, and I saw the pool of blood on the tile creep ever closer to the little blue booties on my feet. It was violent and beautiful--it was a miracle and a shock. But it was life--my life continued, our children, finally here. To have it end in death? If one of them (I can barely even utter the word BOTH) had died, I would have been hollowed out, gutted. I am not a mother, but my heart went out to her in the opening sentences of this novel. She had me. And this was the first page of the book. What could possibly come next? Where would this go? How do you climb above this, survive? In a number of ways: you scream and you cry, you drink yourself to oblivion, you hallucinate other worlds, you bond and you break, you hide and you seek, and if you're lucky, you are seen, you are found.

Lidai Yuknavitch grew up in an abusive household. Her older sister did all that she could to protect Lidia, but in her own time, her sister left, she fled, a matter of survival. They were both trying to flee a violent father and a drunk of a mother, running for their sanity and their lives:

"In my house the sound of leather on the skin of my sister's bare bottom stole my very voice out of my throat for years. The great thwack of the sister who goes before you. Taking everything before you are born. The sound of the belt on the skin of her made me bite my own lip. I'd close my eyes and grip my knees and rock in the corner of my room. Sometimes I'd bang my head rhythmically against the wall.

I still cannot bear her silence while being whipped. She must have been eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Before it stopped."

Lidia's father was abusive, physically, and sexually. And her mother? She was also fighting to survive, but often drowned under the weight of it all, disappearing into a bottle, and herself, rarely the savior she should be:

"My mother was an alcoholic manic depressant borderline suicide case with a limp. All of that."

That would have a weight as well. Which is worse: the father that breaks you down or the mother who turns her back on it all? Eventually, her mother would be her saving grace, signing the paperwork that would get Lidia out of the house, and off to school, a full ride to pursue her swimming, a way out of that demon box, the anger and screaming, the nights spent huddled under blankets in sheer terror, the days spent pretending it wasn't real.

Often, Lidia would turn inward to herself, retreat into the world of swimming, for underwater things were magical, and reality was never quite clear. Which is the real world and which is the imaginary? Why not flip them, why not retreat, or expand, or create? Unfortunately, even in the tiny corners of the world where she could succeed, with her swimming, life was unfair, random acts of cruelty, dreams crushed without hesitation. No father, no mother, no coach (Randy Reese) worth much of anything:

"At the State Swimming Championships my senior year our 200 yard medley relay had the best time in the nation. I stood on the podium with the three other girls and looked out into the stands. My father wasn't anywhere. My mother smelled like vodka - it seemed I could smell it all the way across the pool. Randy Reese didn't even look at me. Then Jimmy Carter took all little girl dreams of swimmer glory away from our bodies with a boycott - Randy's famous pool full of winners included - anyway. There was no word left to belong to. Not athlete, not daughter.

I hated Randy Reese. I hated Jimmy Carter. I hated god. Also my math teacher, Mr. Grosz. I hated my father most of all, a hate that never left but just changed forms. My life had been ruined by men. Now even the water seemed to forsake me."

Her life ruined by men, it's no wonder that she sought out women. She sought out women to fulfill her sexual fantasies. She sought out women in order to create a sisterhood. She sought out women to become her surrogate mother. Anyone that was a safe place to land, that didn't smell of her father, didn't remind her of his hands, his face, his voice. But, that wouldn't be enough. Sometimes we seek out that which destroys us, drawn to the very flames that have burned us before. It's complicated, the psychology of abuse--how girls beaten and molested by fathers can only be satisfied by men that do the same thing. But that circle of shame, the feeling of being less than worthy, of not being entitled to happiness, it stays with you. When the habit, the ritual, is to be punished, told you are worthless, it becomes increasingly difficult to accept any sort of kindness, to be happy with a gentle partner, to love and be loved. It takes time.

Along the way, Lidia sought out punishment, striving to free her demons, to release the pain and branding from her past. She got involved in bondage and discipline--complicated, freeing, sex play with an older dominatrix:

"When she bound my wrists with thin black leather twine Christ-like to the wood I started crying.

`Mother, I would like to be whipped.'

Then she would present a long cat of nine tails - its dark red leather strips the color of blood. `Tell me where you would like to be whipped, Angel.'

So I told her. And begged her. She whipped my breasts. She whipped my stomach. My hipbones. Late into the day. I did not make a sound, though I wept a cleansing. Oh how I cried. The crying of something leaving a body. And then she whipped me red where my shame had been born and where my child had died, and I spread my legs as far as I could to take it. Even my spine ached.

Afterward she would cradle me in her arms and sing to me. And bathe me in a bubble bath. And dress me in soft cotton. And bring me dinner in bed with wine. Only then would we make love. Then sleep. Ten years to bring a self back. In between seeing her I swam in the U of O pool. I swam in the literature of the English Department. In water and words and bodies.

My safe word was `Belle.'

But I never used it."

Lidia evolved. She slowly freed herself from her past, becoming her own woman. She started to have success, and like many things in her life, when it rained, it poured. Four letters with four acceptances, finally the world understand her work, wanted her to study, to teach, to publish. In the spirit of Virginia Woolf she arranged whatever pieces came her way.

Eventually her parents would die. Her mother first, her father two years later. These were not easy deaths for her to swallow. But she would care for her father, even after all that he had put her through, choosing to be the bigger person, to transcend his trespasses. She would not leave her father in a nursing home in Florida:

"Have you ever visited nursing homes in Gainesville, Florida? I have. Let me put it this way. Walking in the door of one brings a disgust to your throat like someone grabbed it. They smell like urine and dead skin and Lysol. The creatures tooling around in wheelchairs or `walking' down halls look befuddled. Like hunched over zombies. In the dining room women whose hair and lipstick are not on straight and men who've wet themselves shove pureed gruel in their mouths. But what makes them particularly hideous in a Floridian sense is the heat. The humidity. The air conditioning that doesn't work quite right. The mold on the walls here and there. Cockroaches. Sometimes the old meat sacks sagging toward death in their beds are restrained.

Whoever I am, I am not a woman who could leave someone to rot in a place like that. Even him."

But later, when disposing of his ashes, there is still a fragment of hate:

"His ashes were in a plastic bag about the size of a loaf of wonder bread. The ashes were white. I went to the funeral home to get them, but that's not all I got. I had asked for his pacemaker and defibrillator. The two mechanical things attached to his heart that had kept him alive after he drowned. How strange they looked, without a body. Eventually Andy helped me smash them on the garage floor with a mallet."

Lidia Yuknavitch is an inspiring woman. Her story brought me to tears several times. The abuse she survived, ingested, and spit out in order to transform herself into the swan that she is today, no longer the ugly duckling, the failure she was so often called by her father, was indeed a life-changing upbringing. The entire time I was reading this book a mantra of mine kept flitting about my ears. I'll paraphrase here, but in the words of Friedrich Nietzsche, "What does not kill me makes me stronger". Lidia must be made of stone by now, marble--diamonds perhaps. Her prose is lyrical, and raw, and dynamic. Her story is haunting, touching, and heart breaking. But it is the truth, and it is all here in an expansive, Technicolor dream.

I can't end this review any better than the final chapter of her memoir, so in the poetic words of Lidia Yuknavitch, persevere:

"Listen, I can see you. If you are like me. You do not deserve most of what has happened or will. But there is something I can offer you. Whoever you are. Out there. As lonely as it gets, you are not alone. There is another kind of love.

It's the love of art. Because I believe in art the way other people believe in god.

In art I've met an army of people - a tribe that gives good company and courage and hope. In books and painting and music and film. This book? It's for you. It's water I made a path through...Come in. The water will hold you."

Holy crap, this book is something else. Fans of Tom Spanbauer will love this taught, muscular prose. Brilliant book. I loved it. I have a friend (with an MFA in writing) who says, "This is the only person who knows how to write sex." True. Although Spanbauer's incredible, too.

The Chronology of Water is the type of memoir that I wish more authors had the intelligence and artistry and chutzpah to write. In a market saturated with poorly written mush, Yuknavitch's prose is alive, raw--satisfying. She is not an author putting the content of her life in front of the language she uses to shape it. It is poetry-tragedy-triumph-wit-guts-language love. This book is so well written that I found myself utterly suspended on sentences that made me laugh, cry, rethink all I know about my body and the words that come out of it, like Yuknavitch writes, "Some deep wrestling match going on inside my rib house and gray matter" (183). If you are a writer you will LOVE this book. If you are a human being, you will be better off for reading it.

Raw, revealing, revelatory... like waves washing over you, gasping for air before the next one pushes you to the bottom twirling, spinning, cartwheeling across a sharp shelled bottom only to find out, it's OK, everything in its time, we'll get through this together. Get oriented again, breathe in, face the wave, plunge back under, eyes opened, further still, now further. Surface, blurry-eyed, seeing clearer than before, longing for more, a little break needed, get back in, backwards forward in time, need a fix, cleansed.

Translation = Get it, read it, feel it, breathe it, look it in the eye mirror. You'll be glad you did.

Lidia Yuknavitch's Chronology of Water does what the best memoirs do--it takes the events of a life (the good, the bad, the ugly, and all the other parts) and makes them into beautiful moments that turn the reader around. Even better, I felt like I was walking along side Lidia through the pages of her stunning book, rather than observing from a distance like other memoirs I've read. Reading Chronology of Water lifted me up and made me cheer on love, being alive, and being loved. And it made me laugh my ass off. Not many books can do that. Plus it has a rockin' cover that leaves me breathless. Definitely recommend!

This book felt honest, fresh, and dared to break the rules. I highly recommend you read it whether you are looking for an interesting read or are studying the craft memoir. Lydia doesn't disappoint.

Funny and horrifying, moving and maddening (I don't know what else to say about this book right now, since I only finished it yesterday.) Just when I thought I had stopped crying near the end of the book, something else would trigger more tears -- of joy, recognition, relief. Anyone who gives it less than 5 stars is afraid to embrace the truth, in all its ugliness, and all its beauty. Not every woman will like it (clearly...), but every woman should read it...

Lidia is just pure awesomeness. I was introduced to her writing when I took a class of hers at my college. Just having her as an instructor is inspiring but after reading her work my respect for her has elevated even more! She is an amazing woman and I definitely recommend this book to every woman, young or old!

This book has an exceptional amount of hype surrounding it. Having supposedly created a new category labeled "Anti-Memoir," I had some reasonably high expectations for this work.

If you take any kind of creative writing classes, or study literature at the college level you will already be familiar with the push toward legitimizing creative non-fiction memoirs. On a fundamental level I'm not really interested in that debate. If someone's writing can hold my attention, entertain, and get me to engage with their text, I'm on board. Fiction, poetry, non-fiction, or mix genre. Good writing stands on its own and transcends any genre. However, the prose in "The Chronology of Water" is premeditated and forced. It reads like any other self-obsessed MFA non-fiction essay awaiting rejection in a lit mag slush pile. It's another example of how this genre is failing to launch.

On a line level the prose is highly pretentious and indulges in narcissistic self-aware faux avant-garde technique applied ad naseum. I'm all for a poignant fragment, but technique applied without reason or restraint renders the attempts into literary gimmicks (e.g. artsy-fartsy nonsense). At the line-level the book will drive an attentive reader bonkers. Anyone foreign to the MFA artsy-fartsy culture will just think there are a lot of typos and bad editing.

Which perhaps could be forgiven if the substance were weighty enough. Frankly, I feel that Yuknavitch is an unreliable narrator of her own life. I certainly don't believe in the truth of this memoir part and parcel. I believe only in Yuknavitch's desire to shock and awe the reader at any cost. All the up-close and personal details feel pimped and slimy. The events are not so much exposed and explored as they are posed and marketed. In the age of internet porn, no one has the luxury of being a prude anymore. Yuknavitch's silly sex details read like teen swaggering, which would be condemned as excessive if this were written by a male, but Yunavitch insists it is all sexy and empowering because she's a woman. The former bad-girl turned house kitten Ph.D. recounts what a naughty slut she once was. Sexual? Yes. Sexy? Not even close.

Read any of the prurient passages and transpose the gender and then ask yourself if you'd read the same thing from a male. I'd then invite you to ask yourself if parroting a braggart legacy of misogyny is really empowering to anyone, male or female. And you can offer the rebuttal "Oh but it's a memoir, she's just recounting her life." But I don't buy it, and that comes down to a question of credibility. Yuknavitch guts her own credibility at every turn. Non-fiction requires a fundamental devotion to the truth and Yuknavitch's tendency toward self-aggrandizing hyperbole left me in disbelief.

It's hard to not judge when reading a memoir, especially one that is so intent on not asking for your permission or forgiveness. I'm not really interested in condemning Yuknavitch. I don't want to be anyone's moral nanny. I believe women can be just as narcissistically self-destructive as any man. What I condemn is the boredom of it all. How does Yuknavitch afford her Rock `n Roll lifestyle? At the expense of the safety, sobriety, and sanity of everyone around her and after ruining other people's lives, she publishes an unabashed memoir of her exploits. Alcoholism, narcissism, and sex-addiction served straight with no chaser of complexity quickly becomes an easily dismissed, salaciously boring read.

In the last few essays Yuknavitch seems to sense this and goes all mushy, which I didn't find redemptive, believable, or satisfying either. It reads more like selling out. The transformation from hard-edged selfish addict to deep-thinking literary snob is not shown, it's told - and again, I just don't believe it. Yuknavitch doesn't pick herself up off the floor and straighten out her own life. No, she looks into the eyes of her married lover and when he tells her he wants her to have his baby - Whoomp There It Is! - She's done been saved by a man's redemptive love (insert Disney desperate lack-of-agency female chorus here). At every turn I feel the authenticity of experience is withheld, my trust as a reader trampled, and my time wasted.

I once heard a tragedy defined as a story where characters come close to transcending circumstances but fail to grow and live up to their potential. In that sense, this memoir, its prose and its "protagonist" are a real tragedy. This has that current buzz on it, where a lot of people are discussing the book - so by all means read it if you want to participate in that dialog, but don't believe the hype.

The writing in this book is excellent, but the author's life is a long string of masochistic, narcissistic, self-abuse with seemingly little emotional growth. I got more than half way through and I just couldn't stand to read about one more binge on drugs, alcohol, sex (some of favorite topics) or childhood issues from a woman who showed no interest in applying her immense talents for anything other than self-destruction.

I bought this book on a "recommended" shelf at my local bookstore. I skimmed through it and thought it looked interesting, and was especially excited by the glowing blurbs and the anticipation of a powerful read. I read a lot of memoirs and I'm always seeking something beyond the super-reflective tale of recovering from abuse that seems to be de rigeur for the genre.

It's definitely true that Yuknavitch has energy to burn, and she persuaded me of the intensity of her flight from her troubled home. I really loved a few things -- the passages about her sister, the chapter about her stillborn baby, her courage to challenge traditional structure.

But all in all, this book in many spots substitutes braggadocio for insight, while in fact going against the tenets Yuknavitch argues she has discovered. It's telling that several five-star reviewers here cite the breast on the cover as some kind of symbol of courage, and some of the blurbs are about her breasts. I would argue it's not, in fact, pro-woman to pick up a book or praise it more because of the author's breasts. (I was interested in the content and actually didn't even peel off the "band-aid" because I was busy reading -- and not because I'm repressed, as some other reviewer implied everyone is who doesn't enjoy the book.) Some of the observations are painfully naive: I didn't find it tough or insightful for Yuknavitch to use (or misuse, or weirdly use) profanity instead of more thoughtful self-expression, or that it's enlightened or enlightening, toward the end of the book, when she wants to swim over and hug the men who are (or she perceives as) gay, to thank them for all gay men having been kind to her -- rather it's just the kind of colonial attitude that Yuknavitch purports to oppose. There is so much information about how sexuality has impacted the writer's life, and yet many of those passages left me cold. It's as if the author rips open her heart and tells all ... without telling much about what actually happened. (And then there's the odd editing, such as the superscript 1 in place of an apostrophe that occurs in several places.)

In some ways, this book might open up new ideas and be liberating for some readers who are not that open-minded to begin with. But for me, in many spots it was so narcissistic and self-aggrandizing that it was painful to read. Ultimately, I appreciated Yuknavitch's effort, but I felt ripped off -- I wanted my $16 and several hours of my life back at the end.

Call me "old-fashioned", "conservative", whatever, but this was a very irritating book. Yes, I'm sure some of what she wrote was *meant* to be vexing and maybe even irritating, but it was just too much for me.

For one thing, I don't like the whole psychological attitude of "I had a rough childhood and that was my excuse for ruining the next few decades of my life". Sorry, it just comes off as whiny and immature, when there are so many others who, in the face of adversity, can rise above it in a vastly more respectable manner.

She freely admits (more than once) how she would drink and drive, ultimately resulting in her tragic head-on collision with a woman who she describes as a "5' tall brown skinned pregnant woman"--yes, six or seven months pregnant, at that. Oh, and that's just the tip of the iceberg; there seem to be decades of her life that were a mere blur involving every kind of drug, every kind of sexual deviation (including some weird fetish involving *breaking into people's homes* to do it there, along with stealing their alcohol and drugs), every kind of crime (possibly short of murder), and so on. The whining goes on and on for half the book, where you watch her unapologetically throw her life away, throw her scholarship away, throw everything that matters away... with zero remorse.

And the "zero remorse" carries through into the present, where you can't help but feel as though she would do it all again the same, given the opportunity. It also carries through in her storytelling, in how she seems to think that things like "slitting the tires of Republicans" and "steal[ing] all the heads of roses" from gardens, is not something about which even now she should be remorseful or express any fault.

Then there is the bitter, but almost ironic, story which opens the book with the tragic birth of her stillborn child. Inexplicably, though, that one life lost tugged pretty seriously at her heartstrings, while her *multiple* abortions seemed to have, in contrast, zero effect on her.

Also, there was the smattering of transparent, unabashed, overt name-dropping all over the place (Ken Kesey, Kathy Acker, etc.) and what antics she was up to with them that just seemed like too much. Some of it was clearly legitimate to her life's story, but some of it just seemed like exactly that: transparent, unabashed, overt name-dropping.

And, finally, there was the issue of her writing style. While her poetic prose was at some points really captivating and powerful, quite often it was just over the top like someone who learns a cool trick and just can't stop repeating it and ends up abuses the crap out of it. It almost seemed too forced, like "look at me, I'm writing a future *classic* because I'm using such heterodox methods and style and such outrageous words and ideas!" Had she toned it all down and made it more subtle, it would have been a lot more meaningful and the emotions a bit more believable to me.

Yes, there are those who would call me "callous" for this review, given the troubles she might have faced, whether physically or psychologically, but, again, I'd have a much easier time accepting this had there been even a small sense of remorse or regret for all the opportunities wasted, the lives hurt, and the damage done to others. But, no; it was all about "me me me". Quite contemporary in that sense.