The Chronology of Water

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.

Powerful, unconventional, readable and very very smart. Devoured it in 3 days flat, the way she has devoured people, writing, learning, sex, and her life. I occasionally found myself skipping a few paragraphs. I usually don't like pyrotechnic writing, but I liked this.

"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.

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.