The Chronology of Water

The Chronology of Water is a memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch that moves non-linearly through her life, organized by emotional association rather than chronology. Yuknavitch states early on that she does not remember her life in order but in "retinal flashes," fragments and repetitions that behave like water and language.

The memoir opens with the stillbirth of Yuknavitch's daughter. After 38 hours of labor, the baby was delivered and placed on her chest: eyelashes long, cheeks still red, lips shaped like a rosebud. Her sister and her first husband Phillip each held the baby, but her mother could not. A nurse guided Yuknavitch to a shower, where she bled, cried, vomited, and had to be pulled from the water. In the weeks that followed, she entered a dissociative state, arranging baby clothes in rows on the carpet, urinating on a grocery store floor, and lying about her daughter being alive for years.

From this loss, the memoir reaches backward into a childhood defined by her father's rage. A "crybaby corner" enforced silence through shame. The sound of her father whipping her older sister Brigid with a leather belt stole Yuknavitch's voice; she did not speak to anyone outside her immediate family until age 13. A red notebook hidden under her bed became her first outlet, where she wrote about her father's anger, swimming, her attraction to girls, and her loneliness. Brigid, eight years older and artistically gifted, eventually refused to come home, hiding under a table in her high school art lab. She left for college when Yuknavitch was 10. Yuknavitch later reveals that Brigid carried razor blades in her purse for nearly two years before she could escape.

At 15, the family moved to Gainesville, Florida, ostensibly for Yuknavitch's swimming career. Her new coach, Randy Reese of the Florida Aquatic Swim Team, barely acknowledged her and shamed female swimmers by weighing them before meets, striking them with kickboards for every pound over target. Her father was absent from her biggest race, her mother was visibly drunk, and Jimmy Carter's 1980 Olympic boycott eliminated any remaining competitive hope.

When scholarship offers arrived, her father rejected each one at the kitchen table. A separate full scholarship came from Texas Tech University in Lubbock, and her mother signed the papers while the father was at work. The summer before departure, his control escalated. One night he sat Yuknavitch on the couch and narrated in graphic detail what boys would do to her sexually, insisting he was "the only man" for her. In their final confrontation in the garage, she screamed back with the lungs of a swimmer and dared him to hit her. He did not. The first things she packed were a flask and a box containing her mother's hair.

At Texas Tech, Yuknavitch lost her scholarship in her second year and flunked out in her third, descending into drug use that progressed from sedatives to heroin. She cycled through rehab and relapse across Lubbock, Austin, and Eugene, Oregon. Phillip, a gentle musician she met at Tech, could not anchor her. They married on a beach in Corpus Christi but separated after she became pregnant and moved to Eugene with her sister. The baby was stillborn. At Heceta Head on the Oregon coast, the family scattered the ashes. A cross-current kept returning the pink box to their feet, and Yuknavitch waded into the freezing ocean in a red wool coat to release the ashes from her hand.

A flashback to age 10 captures the pattern that would define Yuknavitch's survival. Her father forced her to learn to ride a bike by pushing her down a hill. She crashed into mailboxes and was badly injured. He carried her inside and examined her with a flashlight while ordering her crying mother from the room. The next day he made her ride again. She closed her eyes, let go of the handlebars, and stopped braking. She wiped out but did not cry. "Between terror and rage I chose rage."

Yuknavitch's life began to shift when her friend Meredith Wadley brought her into Ken Kesey's 1988-89 collaborative novel writing workshop at the University of Oregon, though Yuknavitch was not a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) student or even a graduate student. Kesey, the novelist whose son Jed had died in 1984, the same year as Yuknavitch's daughter, told her she was good at more than swimming. Through a zine she created in Eugene, she later met Kathy Acker, the transgressive feminist writer, who read her work and told her to continue. Yuknavitch describes Acker and Kesey as "the good mother" and "the good father" in her mind.

In graduate school at the University of Oregon, Yuknavitch pursued a Ph.D. in literature, plunged into relationships with women, and maintained a decade-long involvement with a dominant older woman photographer who gave her a structured form for processing pain through sadomasochistic practice. Her second marriage, to Devin, a charismatic poet and painter she met in graduate school, lasted 11 years of drinking, art-making, and travel. She published her first book of stories, Her Other Mouths, and earned her doctorate. When Devin fell in love with another woman, Yuknavitch collapsed until a friend broke down her door and nursed her back to functioning.

Writing became her means of survival. In a single month, she received acceptance to Columbia University, a teaching job, a grant, and a Writer's Exchange prize from Poets and Writers magazine. She chose the job over Columbia, unable to claim the title of writer. She reflects: "It is important to understand how damaged people don't always know how to say yes, or to choose the big thing, even when it is right in front of them."

At 37, after Devin called on his birthday from Paris to say he had fallen in love again, Yuknavitch drank a bottle of scotch and crashed her car head-on into a vehicle driven by a pregnant woman. She was arrested and completed road crew community service. Andy Mingo, an MFA student at San Diego State University (SDSU), entered her life by offering to loan her a car. Their first date was swimming at a Y pool. He drove her to drunk-driver courses, cooked for her, and attended her AA meetings. His argument for having a child together was one sentence: "I can see the mother in you. There is more to your story than you think."

Yuknavitch taught writing at SDSU through her pregnancy, carrying her belly through the halls until the day before labor; she was eventually fired for her relationship with Andy. The night their son Miles arrived, a thunderstorm broke over San Diego. She walked barefoot to the ocean and addressed her dead daughter: "Lily. He's here." When Miles was placed on her chest, he moved, and his mouth found her breast. Andy let out "a male sob as big as space," a fatherless man rewriting the story.

Her mother died of cancer in 2001. Years earlier, Yuknavitch had saved her father from drowning in the ocean, performing CPR on the man who had abused her. He survived but lost his memory permanently. Andy flew to Florida to bring the now-gentle, memoryless father to an assisted living facility in Oregon. In his room, Yuknavitch found a worn copy of her first book. He told her he had read it many times, adding, "Not very flattering of me though." It was the only exchange they ever had about what happened between them. He died less than two years after her mother.

The family settled in a house in the Bull Run Wilderness near Sandy, Oregon, where both Yuknavitch and Andy produced extraordinary amounts of writing and founded Chiasmus Press, a small independent publisher. In the closing chapters, the memoir returns to swimming as the thread connecting Yuknavitch's life. At the Salishan resort on the Oregon coast, her son Miles decided on his own to put his head underwater for the first time. They looked at each other through the blue.

The memoir closes with Yuknavitch's declaration that her mother did not protect her, and that anyone whose family of origin failed them should make up a new one. She affirms that she believes in art the way other people believe in god. The final invitation is direct: "Come in. The water will hold you."