The Chronology of Water: A Memoir Author: Lidia Yuknavitch | Language: English | ISBN:
B004OA64I4 | Format: PDF
The Chronology of Water: A Memoir Description
This is not your mother’s memoir. In The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch, a lifelong swimmer and Olympic hopeful escapes her raging father and alcoholic and suicidal mother when she accepts a swimming scholarship which drug and alcohol addiction eventually cause her to lose. What follows is promiscuous sex with both men and women, some of them famous, and some of it S&M, and Lidia discovers the power of her sexuality to help her forget her pain. The forgetting doesn’t last, though, and it is her hard-earned career as a writer and a teacher, and the love of her husband and son, that ultimately create the life she needs to survive.
- File Size: 388 KB
- Print Length: 312 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0979018838
- Publisher: Hawthorne Books (April 1, 2011)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B004OA64I4
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #31,377 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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.
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