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    The Chronology of Water: A Memoir
    The Chronology of Water: A Memoir
    The Chronology of Water: A Memoir
    Audiobook9 hours

    The Chronology of Water: A Memoir

    Written by Lidia Yuknavitch

    Narrated by Christina Delaine

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    This is not your mother's memoir. In The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch expertly moves the listener through issues of gender, sexuality, violence, and the family from the point of view of a lifelong swimmer turned artist. In writing that explores the nature of memoir itself, her story traces the effect of extreme grief on a young woman's developing sexuality that some define as untraditional because of her attraction to both men and women. Her emergence as a writer evolves at the same time and takes the narrator on a journey of addiction, self-destruction, and ultimately survival that finally comes in the shape of love and motherhood.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateApr 11, 2017
    ISBN9781541471627
    Author

    Lidia Yuknavitch

    Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of the National Bestselling novel The Small Backs of Children, winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Award's Ken Kesey Award for Fiction as well as the Reader's Choice Award, the novel Dora: A Headcase, and three books of short stories. Her widely acclaimed memoir The Chronology of Water was a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for creative nonfiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Award Reader's Choice. She founded the workshop series Corporeal Writing in Portland Oregon, where she also teaches Women's Studies, Film Studies, Writing, and Literature. She received her doctorate in Literature from the University of Oregon. She lives in Oregon with her husband Andy Mingo and their renaissance man son, Miles. She is a very good swimmer.

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    Reviews for The Chronology of Water

    4/5

    139 ratings19 reviews

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    • 1/5
      The narration is the most irritating and overperformed I have ever heard in an audiobook. I had to stop listening and read so I could avoid the narrator.
    • 5/5
      One of the best audiobooks I've listened to. Lydia's crude honesty is both heart-wrenching and heart-softening. So many emotions can co-exist in one sentence. So like water. Beautiful. Plus, Christina, the narrator, is beyond excellent.
    • 5/5
      The listening journey of The Chronology of Water was comparable to dining at at a five star restaurant - a little taste of everything you ever wanted, samples of treats you didn’t even know you needed. I left the courage of this table full and inspired. Thank you for your courage chef!
    • 5/5
      Awesome and weird and totally worth your time. Not exactly a regular memoir
    • 5/5
      I had the opportunity to see the author speak a few months back and was blown away. Her prose is just as good as I anticipated!
    • 5/5
      I bought this book three years ago. Why the hell did I wait so long to read it?I was surprised at how much I read after cracking open this book. It was not what I expected. Not a story of racing at swim meets and Olympic victories won or lost, but of swimming, drowning in a life wrecked instead of protected and nurtured. Such raw and emotive power, unapologetically broken humanity transformed, saved, through linguistic narratives. I read the words and understood the subtext, the honest self-destruction that makes no excuse for itself, but is a coping mechanism for things endured. The honesty - at times titillating with remorseless sexuality, frank and fluid - is uncomfortably wrong, not what it's supposed to be, which is exactly the way truth should be.The writing is like rapids at first, crazy and broken and joined - sentences simultaneously melded and fractured. Grammar and convention are broken in several ways, reflecting the story in other dimensions beyond the words that craft the narrative, reinforcing them. The style settles conventionally, but not artistically, when the story begins to talk about itself. Representative of maturing? Healing? A different mind picking up the story, using memories too oft revisited, altered a little with each glance?It's an inspirational journey through a life wrenched and recovered, not through redemption, but through wordcraft. Healed? No. Grown beyond in spite of? Certainly. Acceptance is not forgiveness, it is its own power. Her life is one of many passages through a shared hell inflicted, inherited and self-perpetuated, creating the common human coping tropes. Endurance and survival are inspiring themes. Victorious? Definitely, but not because of a Disney ending; it's a human ending, swimmingly complex, defined in water.
    • 3/5
      Lidia Yuknavitch didn’t have a conventional upbringing. She and her sister suffered from verbal, physical, and sexual abuse from their father and sadly her depressed alcoholic mother chose not to intervene. There were people looking out for her though, her swimming coach worked well with her and she began to become and very competitive swimmer. They moved to Florida, with the intention of helping her with her training, but the tormented early life that she had had, caused her to seek solace in drugs and booze.

      She was attracted to both men and women and spent a lot of time pushing the limits of her sexual exploration. She had an abortion and sadly a stillbirth, until one day she met a man called Andy and her life began to stabilise and settle with the birth of their son, Miles and a move to Portland, Oregan.

      This is her memoir of a troubled early life and how she overcome abuse, drugs and alcohol to become the person she is now. It is quite amazing that she survived her earlier life. It has an unusual writing style, with short punchy sentences and brief chapters that are focused on one detail or episode of her life. The prose has a relentless energy and intensity that I haven’t come across before. If you’re not broadminded before reading this book, you will be after; it is quite some book.
    • 5/5
      Very, very beautiful written memoir. A raw life, but she is not exceptional at this. What is exceptional however is her poetic writing style. Very much in love with her as a writer. One of the best books I have read lately and I am a very, very avid reader.Highly, highly recommended!
    • 5/5
      Don't start this book unless you have your schedule clear, and you won't be able to put it down. You will stay up all night reading it. Not just from the subject matter, but from the relentless rhythm and energy. The drug scenes are like that long shot in Goodfellas, without music and movement. It made me dream about my recently-passed mom. I just hope she has more books for me to read.
    • 5/5
      I have never been a memoir reader... but this tale captivated me in a way no other non-fiction piece has in maybe my entire life. I read the entire book in maybe two sittings. It was equally disturbing, fascinating, heart-wrenching and provocative. What a way to indulge in someone else's rough past.
    • 5/5
      This book reads like stream of consciousness. If the prologue hadn’t told me that Yuknavitch was in a writing group with Chuck Palahniuk and Cheryl Strayed, I might have guessed this book was printed as it came out of her head, with no revisions. Not to say that she needs an editor, but that her lyrical writing reads as effortless.

      It is a self-aware memoir; she writes lines like, “But that’s not what I want to tell you about. I want to tell you about this instead.” She bounces around in chronology, but at no point do you get confused and wonder where you are. She mentions a second husband, and you don’t say, “Wait, who’s this second husband? Has she mentioned him before?” You know that she will give you all the information you need when you need it. I wonder how she decided how to order the chapters. When to tell us what.

      Implicit in the narrative is the idea that having been sexually abused by her father as a young girl, Yuknavitch became a sexually aggressive young woman and experimented heavily with drugs. But she’s clear that hers is not a story of addiction.

      Yuknavitch doesn’t give a lot of specifics about the abuse, although she does depict her consensual sex acts in shocking, vivid detail. She doesn’t overly reflect on what it all means. She just tells the story for us to make of it what we will. I appreciate that.
    • 5/5
      I'm not sure what I can say about this book. Maybe that it was written in letters of fire, written in blood that seemed to be my own blood. Made me puke and cry and hide my head under the covers then reach for it again just for a minute? This one, geeze, this one. Gets up inside your head and talks in your own voice, if you are one of those girls. And I am, though it wasn't my father. And my dead babies weren't big enough to hold.

      I don't know that I can recommend it. It's messy and bloody and raw and full of pain. You'll know right away if it's a book you belong in. You'll know.
    • 4/5
      The whole 24 hours or so that I was reading this book I was simultaneously about to cry, and kind of turned on, and thinking about all the people I wanted to lend it to, immediately. Amazing. But, ok, in the interests of patriarchy-smashing I wish she had broken down that "I got my intellect from my father" line more. Like, she fought it, but I felt like it kept limping along insidiously. Still, that is a maybe kind of piddling criticism for a book that is so mesmerizing.
    • 5/5
      I absolutely love this book. You feel like you get this amazing sense of this amazing feminists life from her own voice. When you think about this book and how Lidia fits into the world you think she should regret most of the things that have happened to her or that she has caused in her own life but she has absolutely no regrets. She is so open honest and in your face that you cry, laugh and feel anger at her and for her. This book has everything I have wanted to say coming from a woman's standpoint but never have been able to. Everyone should read this book. Thank you Lidia...for sharing your incredible story of being who you are.
    • 5/5
      I love this book! Strange thing to say about this book, it is a story of grief, rage, abuse, freedom, and self destruction. A story of looking for and finding life agaisnt forces that try to destoy life. Lidia grew up in abusive family, she hurt so much it turned to rage. She found a way out by swinning then writing. It about that and more.
    • 5/5
      Wow! This was an amazing book. Powerful and raw. I was blown away by her story and her telling of it.
    • 5/5
      There is something so deliriously compelling about the way this woman writes. She doesn't describe things so much as grabs your hand and pulls you into exactly where she is, wherever she is, whether she is swimming or lusting or hating or loving or fucking or reading or writing or drinking or smoking or whatever she is doing: her vortex is mesmerizing.
    • 5/5
      This book cover has a boob on it.How could I miss a BOOB on my book?I looked again, and the publisher had added a 'sleeve' tacked on to cover the nudity!I immediately ripped it off and trashed it.I liked the boob.It's a nice boob.I can't help it.I'm not finished with this book, but I have to talk about it anyway.So it's not a book REview, nor a book PREview. It's a book MIDview.I love this book because ... she writes like I think. Short, staccato sentences. Verbs. Blurting. Metaphors bleeding.I love this book because even though she's created other art that my sometimes privileged, surburban average, fairly sheltered sensibilities probably wouldn't stomach -- or maybe even be interested in -- I can still *feel* her in this book. I can share the same sweat that crowds our pores when we are inspired by something we finally understand.I love this book because I am inspired. Because I get excited by words again.Believe it or not, but when you write a memoir (or frankly any body of words -- poetry, fiction, dissertations) you get tired of your own ... everything. Your own sentences. Your own story structure. Your own character arc. They all become filler. Fiber. The whey protein of ideas.But reading Lidia's memoir gives me permission to Open. To say Fuck. To have original ideas. To break the rules of line editing. To write in stream of consciousness with no scene and sequel, or to paint yellow tulips red and set fire to them.She gives me permission to unleash. To say what needs to breathe -- with concrete sensory detail.She makes up words and says 'Um' and makes one word into one paragraph.Just like I do.Here's an excerpt that I read in Allan Bros one day. And let me tell you, if I hadn't been in Allan Bros, I would've stood up out of my chair and whooped. And pumped the air with my hips. And shimmied.She's talking about a literary journal she helped start up:"Through the wordhouse I found voices and bloodsong exactly how it felt to me on the inside where I thought I was the only one. There were others like me. Um, lots of them. Breaking writing rules. Reaching for writing impossibilities. Taking their newly found intellects into alien territories. Making things up. Maybe even a life. A self." ~pg. 192.I can't wait to get back to the book!
    • 4/5
      Lidia divorces her memoir from convention by defying the narrow marketing classifications of niche, genre, and narrative timeline. It is not about swimming. it is not about writing. It is not about abuse or incest. It is not about miscarriages or motherhood. It is about all of those things, but only as they are given as sacrifice to the transformative power of story. This is one of those "you laugh and then you cry" books. And it isn't. This isn't easily digestible chicken soup for your soul. This is the thick, hearty, and tough stew of memory brought into light by language.