The Chronology of Water

Interview with Lidia Yuknavitch

RHONDA HUGHES, PUBLISHER AND EDITOR FOR HAWTHORNE Books, conducted this interview with Lidia Yuknavitch.

RH: Your memoir opens with the loss of your daughter and your grief process. It is some of the most beautiful writing in the book, poetic, rich imagery, lines that demand the reader speak them aloud. Your ability to transform profound grief into art, into literature, speaks to me. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to publish your work. You write, “Language is a metaphor for experience. It’s as arbitrary as the mass of chaotic images we call memory, but we can put it into lines to narrativize over fear.” Can you talk a little bit about your experience recreating with words this time in your life?

LY: You know Faulkner said, “Given the choice between grief and nothing, I choose grief.” The same quote has been attributed to him about pain.

I’m not sure it is possible to articulate grief through language. You can say, I was so sad I thought my bones would collapse. I thought I would die. But language always falls short of the body when it comes to the intensity of corporeal experience. The best we can do is bring language in relationship to corporeal experience-bring words close to the body-as close as possible. Close enough to shatter them. Or close enough to knock a body out. To bring language close to the intensity of experiences like love or death or grief or pain is to push on the affect of language. Its sounds and grunts and ecstatic noises. The ritual sense of language. Or the cry.

Poetic language — and by that I mean the language of image, sound, rhythm, color, sensation-is probably the closest we bring language to experience — poetic language takes you to the edge of sense and deep into sensation. So after I name my primal grief, the death of my daughter the day she was born, it felt precise to move directly to poetic language. The metaphor of collecting rocks is more “true” to me to the experience of grieving than to say, I was intolerably sad. It feels precise to draw that metaphor of collecting rocks out, to extend it as long as possible, to let the reader feel the space of grief in the house the way I did. It’s my hope that at least one person will find resonance in that extended language space.

I want you to hear how it feels to be me inside a sentence. Even if some of the sentences seem to lose their meaning. I want the rhythm, the image, the cry to remain with your body. 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.

You have published both fiction and nonfiction. Can you talk about your experience with both genres as well as the role memory plays?

While I was writing this book, many things occurred to me about both memory and about the relationship between fiction and non-fiction.

About memory, after my father drowned and lost his wits — specifically his short-term and a good bit of his long-term memory, I became rather obsessively interested in how memory works at the level of neuroscience and biochemistry. I was trying to deal with the fact that the things he’d done had been “erased” from experience. Part of me didn’t believe it-I’d look at him and think, is the dark side of him still in there? Tucked deeply behind the gray matter?

Turns out, according to neuroscience, the more you actively “remember” something, the more the headstory you carry around changes. Every time you recall something, you modify it a little bit and that’s because brains-this is very cool — brains work through a mixture of images, pictures, feelings, words, facts, and fiction-all “recollected.” Eventually you are not remembering what happened at all, but your story or head movie about it. The safest memories are probably those embedded in the brains of people who have lost the ability to retrieve them.

In writing, every narrative and linguistic choice you make forecloses others, directs the story a certain way, focuses on a particular image, extends a metaphor that on another day, you might have chosen very differently. Form has everything to do with content in this sense. So what is “true” in non-fiction writing is also always “crafted” — given shape and composition and emotional intensity-through our narrative choices as writers. And that’s in addition to the science of memory. So the true story is always a fiction. This is why I have come to believe that non-fiction and fiction are as inextricably linked as memory and imagination — which, as it turns out, also use the same brain circuits when they are active.

So much of memory is recollecting pieces. And that’s what writing is — drawing from language to recollect and shape pieces of things. I am absolutely more able to reveal emotional truths about myself or anything inside fiction writing. The imaginative realm makes the most “sense” to me in my life — it’s everything else in life that is difficult. But I did find something in the course of writing this non-fiction book that truly amazed me. I could address my mother and father as characters from parts of their lives that did not include me. I could imagine a prestory to them. I could feel compassion for them. And I can thank them for this life I have, as bittersweet a process as that is to move through.

Earlier you mentioned the metaphor of collecting rocks. One of my favorite chapters, “Metaphor,” describes this as follows: “The rocks. They carry the chronology of water. All things simultaneously living and dead in your hands.” Here also is your title. What does the chronology of water mean to you?

Yes, this title came to me long ago-when I was 26! Wait, was I ever 26? Man that seems like epochs ago. I was in a creative writing workshop with the wonderful Diana Abu-Jaber. My daughter had just died, and I was a mess-raging, grieving, self-destructing. But I did manage to make it into that creative writing classroom. I wrote a crazy short story made from seemingly random fragments. Diana looked at the rush of fragments and said Lidia, they all have something in common. Because I was a knownothing, I said, what? Water, she said. She also said, I think this is a book. I think it’s the story of your life, maybe.

But at that time I was busy. Busy raging, grieving, fucking up.

Later I pulled the story back out and looked at it. You know what? She was right. And I thought, if this is the story of my life, no wonder it’s in fragments. It’s got a messed up chronology because that’s how I feel about life-it’s not linear. It moves in fits and starts, doubles back, repeats or extends an image. I thought if my life has a chronology, it’s the chronology of water — the way water carved the earth, the way water carries us into the world, the way we are made of water, the way water retreats or comes. I had, in other words, with her help, found my central metaphor.

That story was eventually published in The Northwest Review, and as you know, all these years later, has become the spine and bones of this book.

In my house there are many rocks. What I love about rocks that you find in rivers or at the ocean’s shore is that they are the sediment of all life on the planet continuously destroyed and remade. When you hold a rock in your hand you are holding everything in existence, even space dust, and it’s traveled oceans to get to you. So fragile and yet solid — made from pieces of things — like we are.

Writing restored your personal narrative that was not allowed in your father’s house while you were growing up. “My voice, she was coming. Something about my father’s house. Something about alone and water.” Does writing provide the same essential to Lidia the adult? Are the reasons you wrote then and now different?

Many people will know what I mean when I say that I can’t seem to live without the process of making art. I mean I literally fall apart or go to shit when I’m not making something, I can’t find the balance in my life or the center, I’m simply less of a person. Lost. Or worse. It feels like writing is the only thing I am any good at, but that probably isn’t entirely true. What I mean when I say that writing is the only thing I am good at is that it is the place where I feel most present, most worth a crap, most able to give something useful.

But there is another thing about writing that may or may not be something I should tell people-ha. I do know that when I’m inside writing I don’t want to be anywhere else. It’s like being inside a song or a painting. Wouldn’t it be something to be able to inhabit art? It’s a little frightening though — to think about staying there — not coming out. Perhaps that is a psychosis edge. I have a painter friend who talks this way about wanting to stay inside the painting — trusting images and color and composition more than people — I definitely feel that way too. We joke about not coming out sometimes.

There are reasons to come out. My son, my family. Love. Animals, the ocean.

Too, it strikes me that in America we don’t much have a “sacred” place or role for the isolate artist any longer. Everything has been sucked up into marketing and celebrity and the almighty commodity — so if you are a writer, you are meant to sell something. If it sells, it has worth. But in my heart of hearts I just want to sneak individual books into the pockets of sad people. Or stuff pews with them! Because writing gave me a place to go and be and grow when I wanted to give up. And I’d like to jam my foot in the doorway so that others might find this place too. And yes, that is still true. Maybe more than ever.

Swimming offered you water, respite from home, your life there. During your senior year of high school at the State Championships your relay team scored the best time in the nation. “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 world left to belong to. Not athlete, not daughter.” Later you accepted a scholarship in Texas and once there left both the college and competitive swimming. Did the U.S. boycott of the Olympics have anything to do with this or affect your future relationship with the sport?

My sister and I have always had a little bit of a hard time distinguishing reality from fiction. We both escaped our childhood terrors in books and music and art, and those creative worlds were more real to us than the one that trapped inside my father’s house.

Something could be “true” one minute, say, Christmas morning with presents and a tree, and rendered “untrue” within the first twenty minutes of opening presents if my father’s rage got loose. Or you could get an “A” at school, and bring it home only to be shamed: “What, does that make you special?”

Once my sister crawled underneath her high school art lab table and refused to come home. Ever. I’d go to school or to swim team-my two great escapes — and be unable to tell reality from nonreality. At the pool, in the safety of water, alongside the beautiful bodies of almost women, was that reality? At school where teachers gave me books to read that forever took me to other worlds, wasn’t that real? Or was reality back at home, where even breathing meant shame?

Reality lost its hold on me by the time I was 10.

Very good swimmers spend their youth trying to swim to an endpoint like the Olympics. A tangible goal you are living for. Training for. Year after year. Something to give you self worth. Something to make you feel special. And if you were fast enough, maybe you could even swim all the way to a new life.

So when the Olympic Boycott happened, it proved what I already suspected was true. Reality could disappear in an instant — a man could take it from you forever.

I think the beginning of my deepest acts of self destruction often have something in common — a question that comes up in different forms over the course of a life-when the thing you are living for dies right in front of you, why go on? It’s a sadness that enters us all, just differently I suppose. But that Olympic boycott was one of my earliest moments of consciousness with regard to the mutability of reality in the world. Something called “politics” could steal your personal life. Just like something called “father” could. And I’d already grown up through the Nixon years and survived early Catholic upbringing … so even children understood to be cynical.

On the hopeful side though, swimming, books, art, and love — those worlds are still most real to me. In the best sense of that puny word.

You purposely divulge few details relating to your drug use and you don’t declare whether or not you have a “problem” with either drugs or alcohol, although you mention going to rehab and jail both more than once. What was your thinking about this part of your narrative?

Over the years I have become very disappointed in the idea that there can be only one, monolithic narrative about alcoholism or addiction. What I mean is, we’ve come to a time in both capitalism and literary history where unless you tell the right story about drug and alcohol dependency, you don’t get to tell it at all. And that one, right story is most often dictated by the market — by agents and editors and publishers and media.

What a consumer audience needs the story to be.

If you write outside of those lines, you will more often than not be coached back into the center.

I think of the writers and painters and musicians who have inspired me to not kill myself and keep going. Most of them did drugs and alcohol. All of them, really.

I never say in this book what happened to the woman I hit head on with my car. I have deferred that information purposefully. Because I want you to stay with me — me drunk driving across eight lanes of freeway traffic at midnight in my car — stay with me inside my own pain and grief and vodka breath and pee and barf-stay with me as the gunpowder smell from the airbags fills the car.

Sometimes we’re just sad. And wrong-headed. And drunk. That’s all.

There are so many stories to tell about what we do to our bodies.

There is a history to the mythos about addiction in the country-we’ve always burned witches — but I think the potent turning point was probably the establishment and codification of A.A. in this country. And the subsequent nationalized embrace of the general principles of the A.M. A. and the A.P.A. and the bible of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — how each of these defines illness and cures. Not to mention religion’s role in the false narrative of redemption. Now a whole industrial complex exists to serve the addiction narrative, along with a handy pharmaceutical empire.

My mother was an alcoholic. But I never think of her that way. I think she was in pain most of her life. I think she was just trying to drown a sadness that wouldn’t lift. I think if I had been her I would have killed myself like she tried to. I wish I had come conscious sooner. Maybe we could have talked about it. What drinking is. What it isn’t.

The other thing I’d say is that if we didn’t have drugs and alcohol, we wouldn’t have art. I know that is not a popular thing to say but I believe it is true nonetheless. Our drug and alcohol excesses kill people. Yes. But they also are part of who we are as artists. Part of why cultural production exists. Whether we want to admit it or not.

You write about the night you mother attempted suicide and how it angered you so that you wrote, “When I came out of the bathroom I felt a little bit like a person who could kill her.” It seems as if your relationship with your mother was more complex and complicated because while she angered you she was also the parent who was there for you in ways your father was not such as taking you to and from swim practice and setting you free to accept the swim scholarship from Texas Tech in Lubbock. As your mother was dying you told her that you loved her. Did this love include forgiveness? Can you say a bit about when and how this forgiveness developed?

You know Marguerite Duras once said “in childhood and the lives that follow, the mother represents madness. Our mothers remain the craziest people we’ve ever met.”

My mother remains the craziest person I ever met. But I mean something quite complex when I say that, maybe even profound. Up until the death of my daughter I would say that I maintained an antagonistic stance with my mother. I fought with her-I chose to fight with her-to find my own edges. She let me. She fought back. I brought my rage and pain right up to the surface of her puffy with drink skin. She let me. Maybe she even drew it out of me. Though we never laid a hand on each other.

We raged by and through one another. Not the rage of the father or symbolic father. The rage of women let loose, uncontained, when no one but us was in the house. I remember how her blue eyes went to the color of steel. I remember admiring it.

How she let me down of course is that she never took my sister and me out of that house, away from our father. She didn’t save us.

How she was there for me though was that she took me. She didn’t flinch. She took the full force of my adolescence and young adulthood and all the hatred and rage I had stored up and she didn’t move a muscle. I yelled. She yelled back. It’s a survival skill. A skewed one, to be sure, but one that carries an unusual strength. Sometimes I think our fighting bore me.

The last time she tried to “spank” me I was 10. She broke several blood vessels in her hand. I already had a muscled up swimmer’s butt. I just stared at her after she hit me as hard as she could on the ass. I think she knew in that moment what would rise between us. All the rage we carried to survive my father. Everything it would take to enter “woman” in this still dumb world.

When my daughter died I broke. Open. Into stories. For the first time in my life, I wanted to know what my mother’s story was. Badly. So I asked her. When I explored what my mother’s story had been all I felt was compassion for the girl of her. Someone should have done something to save her. No one did. It’s a wonder she was alive at all.

Maybe forgiveness is just that. The ability to admit someone else’s story. To give it to them. To let it be enunciated in your presence. It’s your job not to flinch.

Another subject that you name, but don’t go into detail is your father’s sexual abuse. Throughout the narrative there are references to the narrator’s experience such as, “Or all the nights I made him [Phillip] break into other peoples’homes the way my father had broken into me,” and during a conversation with Andy after the narrator tells him that her father was abusive and he asked what the father did, the narrator’s reply is simply, “Sexual.” Your father moved to Oregon from his home in Florida so that you could help care for him. Did you come to find forgiveness with your father? Was it the same as with your mother or different? How so?

Another narrative that’s supersaturated the literary landscape at this point in time is the incest narrative. Someone in my writing group actually called it “cliché”… Though when she said it I went into the bathroom and cried, I know what she meant. She meant that the incest narrative has been marketed and disseminated to such an extent that it’s running out of meaning.

That sounds so horrible to say but talk to an editor or agent or publisher and you will hear rhetoric about the incest narrative and how to sell it or what will prohibit your book from selling.

As if that’s what matters.

So like the drug and alcohol monolithic narrative, there are so many stories of incest out there yet to be told. But if you don’t tell the right incest narrative, you got butkus. My goal in offering my own story isn’t to claim that abuse suffered from my father is any more important than anyone else’s. Nor is it to “claim” the incest narrative to sell books.

My goal is to put the reader into the space of childhood and young adulthood where fear and confusion and rage get born — like they do in us all for different reasons. To put the reader in their body through language. Because when I teach or give readings or workshops, I meet a hundred people who know what it feels like to be shamed, or beaten, or molested, or just made small. We all move through the waters. Language helps us feel less separate.

When my mother died my father was stuck in Florida. Alone. With not much of his wits left. With major heart damage. With a lien on his house. Andy and I visited some nursing homes in Florida. I threw up. They were simply awful. Whoever I am, I could not leave him there. I couldn’t leave Hitler there. It simply wasn’t possible for me to purposefully kill him or torture him or neglect his body. Ironic.

I don’t believe in god. I don’t particularly believe in the cult of sin and redemption. But I do believe in energy. What I hold my father most responsible for is for not facing his own darkness — not acknowledging it as his. I think that is a flaw a great many of us struggle with. Like in The Tempest when Prospero says about Caliban, “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.” We all have to claim that which we have created. For me it’s a detachment that I have to watch out for every day of my life — else I become untethered from the ones I love, even from life. My father never acknowledged his capacity for cruelty. His uncontainable anger. His misplaced desires. Maybe I learned to forgive him from the language and poetics of Shakespeare.

But forgiveness isn’t the best I have to give him. Even as a dead man, the best I have to give him is an acknowledgement that I came from him. And I did not kill myself. I am living beyond his life, his end and pulse. I am trying to put things into the world that alchemize the dark and turn it to something beautiful and smooth you can carry in your hand. A small mighty blue stone.

I’ve never met anyone who hasn’t fucked up in their life a time or two. Royally. I’m pretty sure that’s what keeps us connected to one another. Not so much the superhuman savior stories. It’s called being human. It’s the energy and matter. Words let us say that.

Language! What a thunderous mercy, huh?

Sexuality in The Chronology of Water is a multilayered, multidimensional aspect of your emotional life. From the beginning you had an attraction to both sexes and later as an young adult your sexuality became both a source of power and an expression of grief. It seems that as you discovered your writing talent and continued your education, finishing with a Ph.D. in English Literature, your sexuality also underwent transition. Was this your experience? And, while your sexual life may have been considered unconventional by some, you choice to marry men and ultimately become a family with Andy and Miles is more in line with society at large. How have you incorporated all these aspects into your adult life?

My sexuality is still very much in flux. But I would say that about us all. The limits we put on our own sexual development and exploration are partly cultural scripts and partly our own hopes and fears playing out skin stories. In other words, sexuality is always undergoing transition — just like our bodies and minds and souls and energies — always in flux.

So to be married might mean for some people that they shut down their sexual journey, or that they follow a wife/mother storyline, but I remain interested in explorations in between those things, at the edges, or beyond the regular orbits.

I do still think that culturally speaking there is a very narrow bandwidth available for women in terms of sexual development. Wife, mother, lover, other. Men too, of course, but I have lived the limits more in terms of women and girls. But if psycho-sexual development and corporeal development is lifelong, then I consider it part of my job in life to journey right up until the last. Even if I’m a dried up old raisin. Because I think bodies are about the coolest thing in … ever. Your body. Mine. All the different kinds. What a glory bodies are. I hope to write a book about bodies in the near future.

Your scholastic achievements are admirable, especially given that you accomplished them without support from your parents and despite the emotional chaos of your younger life. What drove you to do this?

Survival. Pure and simple. I discovered early on that mobility for a woman in this culture is crucial. The ability to live and work on your own if you have to is vital. The ability to pursue the life of the mind is vital. The ability to journey the body’s full story is vital. Volition. If you can find that in yourself you are going to be okay.

I have a picture of myself running away from home for the first time. I’m three. I have a small plastic suitcase and a big scary looking doll. My cat “spice” is in the foreground, probably wondering where I’m going. My sister is in the background, nearly out of the frame, in the most glorious red dress.

I went to the edge of the yard and sat on the curb for about 30 minutes.

The house is near Stinson Beach near San Francisco, where I was born. The yard was filled with fruit trees. The house was filled with anger. My sister and I were terrified most of our childhoods. My father bred fear into the bodies of his daughters.

And yet, in that moment of the picture, taken by my mother who no doubt thought it looked cute, like mothers do, I knew what to do. Volition.

There is art in that.

I believe in art the way other people believe in god. I say that because books and paintings and music and photography gave me an alternate world to inhabit when the one I was born into was a dead zone. I say it because if you, even inside whatever terror itches your skin, pick up a pen or a paintbrush, a camera or clay or a guitar, you already have what you are afraid to choose. Volition. It was already in you.

Just be that-what moves inside you. It’s already there, waiting:

Hush for the line

Crouched like the touch of dreams in your fingertips

She is coming with a vengeance.