The difficult things we experience in our lives help create who we are. But how do the stories we tell ourselves - and others - about that trauma affect us?
Lidia Yuknavitch, the celebrated Oregon writer of fiction, essays and memoirs, has written a new book about how reframing our stories can release us from what she calls “the tyranny of our mistakes, our traumas, and our confusions.”
Yuknavitch joins us in the studio to talk about her latest book, “Reading the Waves.”
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We start today with the Oregon writer Lidia Yuknavitch. She is the bestselling author of the novels “Thrust,” “The Book of Joan,” “The Small Backs of Children” and “Dora: A Headcase.” Her latest book is a memoir called “Reading the Waves.” It’s a kind of response to her 2011 memoir, “The Chronology of Water.” It covers some of the same traumatic events but with a different purpose. “I mean to ask,” she writes, “if there is a way to read my own past differently using what I’ve learned from literature, how stories repeat, and reverberate, and release us from the tyranny of our mistakes, our traumas, and our confusions.” Lidia Yuknavitch, welcome back to Think Out Loud.
Lidia Yuknavitch: I am entirely pleased, humbled and excited to be here.
Miller: I am thrilled to have you on. So in 2011, as I noted in that short intro, you published an award-winning memoir called “The Chronology of Water,” a book that covers some of the same raw material as this new book. Early on in the new book, you write this: “What I didn’t realize was that even after writing a book about memories in my life up to that point, I was quietly and masochistically still trying to carry all the bodies of my own heartbreak, my own stillborn gestures of love, rage, grief and dazzling blunders. I was sticking to my story, unwilling to let the story become or move.” How did you realize that?
Yuknavitch: Well, this may sound silly, but when I passed through the crucible we call menopause, I gained a whole bunch of weight, which is very common. So I was heavy. I was heavy in the water, I was heavy on walks, heavy in my life and depressed. And I just started feeling differently about what the hell is going on with all this heaviness, beyond the obvious. I meditate a lot and some of the answer that came forward, both meditating and in the swimming pool – which is my other form of meditation – was, “What are you holding on to? What is it at this age, 60, 61 now … what are you holding on to?” And when that question bloomed in me, a whole series of ideas and feelings came forward. That was probably the origin point of these stories starting to come out and me asking, “Can you set any of them down? Can you rearrange something?”
So, as weird as that sounds, I think it may have come from that original heaviness that I then took as a metaphor and asked, what does it mean?
Miller: It doesn’t sound weird at all. And it sounds particularly not weird coming from you, given how much you have emphasized the importance of paying attention to the body when it comes to everything else that follows and when it comes to words, memories and stories. So it fits perfectly in the way you talked about our lives and making sense of our lives. What does it mean to stick to your story?
Yuknavitch: Well, I may be wrong or right, or something in between about this, but I think sometimes some of us hold on to the things that have happened to us, really tightly. And we hold on to them over time, maybe because it’s familiar and it’s something you can say, “This was mine.” Like even pain and trauma. This was mine. This happened.
Miller: Or, “This is how I understand myself.”
Yuknavitch: Yeah. Identity.
Miller: Which may be different but related.
Yuknavitch: No, you’re on to it. And you hold on so tightly. It’s more familiar to keep it close and hold it than it is to let go and see what’s on the other side. That can be scary or alienating. So when I said sticking to my story, it’s like I told that story. I exist. Therefore, that’s my story. But the problem side of sticking to your story is that change and growth don’t come from stasis.
Miller: This connects to something you wrote soon after those same parts. This is all from early in the book, and we can hear stuff from later as we go, but you wrote this: “There are bodies in me that I had to set down, stop carrying if I wanted to be of further use in the world. I had to invent a process of how to lay those bodies down, including my own bodies of sorrow, guilt, pain, so that change might continue to get born in my life.” What was your starting place for inventing that process?
Yuknavitch: Shockingly, it happened in water. People think I’m kidding when I say this, but I’m not kidding. I sort of talked to a seal in the Salmon River, which has seawater in it. So there’s seals swimming in it. And I bought a wetsuit so I could get in the water. And when I say I talked to the seal, it’s the same thing as if I go talk to a tree or go talk to the ocean. I literally ask questions, knowing they’re not gonna answer me exactly how you and I are speaking. But I just put the questions out. So I put a question out toward this seal.
Miller: Because there was a seal in front of you?
Yuknavitch: Yeah. In the water with me.
Miller: Looking at you?
Yuknavitch: I can’t say it’s true it was looking at me. But in my experience, it felt true that it was looking at me. Is that answer OK? [Laughter]
Miller: We could spend the rest of this conversation talking about the gap between those things or those ideas, but let’s [continue]. So you’re in there. There’s a seal that may or may not care about you …
Yuknavitch: Probably not.
Miller: But you cared about it.
Yuknavitch: Yep, I’m bonding anyway.
Miller: What did you ask it?
Yuknavitch: The first question, in the old school meditation sense, that came out of me was, “How do I age?” That just kind of floated up cause I don’t know the answer – and it’s a hard one.
Miller: How do you not age is another question?
Yuknavitch: Yeah. Well, that’s the question. We all do. It’s happening.
Miller: But how do you reckon with it? How do you change the way it means something to you? How do you not go crazy? And on and on.
Yuknavitch: Of course, the seal answered, if we’re playing this story out. There’s no beginning. There’s no end. There’s only shape shifting. And that resonated. Plus, I’m looking at a creature who, on land, looks kind of silly and struggling to me, but in water is miraculous. So I thought about that because I, too – which I’ve written about ad nauseam 10 million times – am more comfortable in water than I am on land.
So I really rode that moment for all it was worth, and again asked, “What is the metaphoric value of that beyond the literal?” Which is a literature question, or a poem question, or a look at a painting question. Then the question and the answers open up into 10,000 things if you let them.
Miller: You use the word “story” as a verb in your writing. You say you have to retrieve the important particles from your own life that will help you story, de-story and re-story your life. What does it mean to have story be a verb?
Yuknavitch: Everything, obviously. [Laughter] You know how if you were at a dinner with close friends or family – although we’re all pissed at each other’s families now, so let’s stick with close friends – and something happens. And everybody goes home that night and has to write a one-page story about whatever it was that happened. You know how all those stories would be different from each other? By nature. But it wouldn’t mean that one of you wrote something true and the other person wrote something false. It would mean you need all the pieces of the story to get the story. And the idea that there are multiple points of view, multiple versions, multiple pieces, also corresponds to the idea that there may be multiple arrangements.
This is where my old dead gal, Virginia Woolf, has been so influential on me. She wrote one tiny phrase that said: “Put the pieces where you may.” That changed my life. Because I got old enough to realize she’s not just talking about literature and stories. She’s talking about how stories are alive in us. And we might do that same thing in our understanding of our own lives.
Miller: Did the act of writing this new memoir, “Reading the Waves,” feel different than writing “The Chronology of Water”? And I’m wondering in particular about some of the biographical periods of your life that you wrote about in both of them.
Yuknavitch: It felt radically different, almost as if I was a different person. I’ve tracked down the “well, how is that, Lidia,” a little bit, to this idea that we can all develop the ability to stand in a different position to our life events than the position we were in when they happened to us. A little bit, I’ve learned this from my sister who is a therapist and does psychodrama. In psychodrama therapy, you can repeat a life story but stand in a different position as almost like a character. And I really grabbed hold to that idea, and thought about my memories and my past that way.
Miller: But I imagine that’s something … I don’t think we talked for that memoir you wrote 14 years ago or published 14 years ago. But even then, to write a memoir at all, you have to stand outside yourself to some extent …
Yuknavitch: You do. You do.
Miller: But I’m still curious what was different about this time?
Yuknavitch: Well, I mean, there was one big obvious difference which is that I’m older. And every year of your life you feel like a different person because you are, physically, mentally, emotionally. So there’s that obvious thing. But I think too, in that first kind of story space, in “Chronology of Water,” I was so obsessed with and delighted by and challenged by the effort to express and find a language for corporeal expression. Different from memoirs I’d read up to that point that just describe in languages that are fairly traditional and sound like each other.
I was looking for a bodily embodied language and form of expression. And in “Reading the Waves,” the entire aim or process wasn’t that. The aim or process was: can we step into memory the way we step into stories, books, art and music, and look for patterns and arrangements, and then curate differently? I keep thinking of this really dumb movie. Maybe it’s not dumb.
Sorry, fans of this movie. The book is great. “Minority Report.” There’s this one scene where Tom Cruise is moving things around on a big screen – people, memories and events.
Miller: It’s one of those images from the movie that is indelible and very helpful as a visual version of the way you could maybe manipulate reality. Post-it notes floating around.
Yuknavitch: Yeah, I mean, for me personally, the core way to understand it would be the way the ocean collects everything living, everything dead, everything from the past and everything from the present … turns it up in a wave and spits it on the shore. That works for me, but I know that doesn’t work for everybody. Tom Cruise probably works for everybody.
Miller: You have a quote that I wrote down somewhere. I can’t find it at this exact moment, but it’s all about that. Well, I’ll find it another time and we’ll mention it another time. But about how life and death are all tossed around in the ocean, and you feel like they’re tossed around in you as well.
Yuknavitch: Absolutely. I first learned that when my daughter died the day she was born, which most readers who have read “Chronology of Water” know about. Life and death suddenly, irrevocably were not on a linear scale with a beginning and an end. They were in the same space, that I held in my arms for too long. That had a profound impact on me that changed me forever. The beginnings and endings aren’t what we thought.
Miller: So much of what we’ve talked about so far in this conversation is personal. They’re about your efforts to excavate or really to reframe, to refocus, to re-story your memories. How do you think about your audience in this, your readers?
Yuknavitch: I think about them with a kind of question I carry. It’s something like, can I open some portals where someone who’s reading, who identifies with some piece of what I’m describing, can enter and exit as a reader – which is different from “Chronology of Water.” I wanted you to feel something in your actual body in “Chronology of Water” that you couldn’t wiggle away from, for good or ill.
This storytelling, it’s like, “Look, here’s a door, here’s a window.” You can come into it and walk out of it, or laugh or cry. But it’s moving and it’s changing, so it’s not gonna get stuck in you. And that just feels really different as a process. Does it do that? I have no idea. But you asked me how I think of the reader. If a reader was here, they might say, “That’s not true.”
Miller: We don’t have to worry about them. They’re not here right now. [Laughter]
The book is about a lot of different periods in your life. But the period that you come back to over and over is the time you spent with your second husband, Devin Eugene Crowe, who died now a little over 10 years ago. How is it that he became so central to this book?
Yuknavitch: Well, he got spit out of the other book. When I was writing “Chronology of Water,” it was much closer to our demise as a couple, which was very dramatic, difficult and traumatic. I had almost 15 chapters about him in the early drafts of “Chronology of Water.” And bless Rhonda Hughes forever – Portland publisher Rhonda Hughes of Hawthorne Books – for seeing that that was excessive and derailing the possible stories that could be in “Chronology of Water” about me and my life. So that means there were 15 chapters of material laying around on the cutting room floor, in my case tucked in this one drawer that shall not be opened.
Miller: Written by a different version of you?
Yuknavitch: Written by a different version of me. So while I was writing “Reading the Waves,” he kept surfacing in little pieces, in my memory and in the storytelling. And that periodic resurfacing started to matter to me in this way. Not, “oh no, here comes that again.” But, what if there’s another way to look at that and finish releasing it? And I could feel that in my body. So when I wrote a tiny bit more, I could feel it more.
Miller: A sign to keep going.
Yuknavitch: Yeah.
Miller: Could you read us a section from near the end of the book?
Yuknavitch: I certainly can.
[Reading excerpt from “Reading the Waves”]
“The more he drank, the more empty he became. When I find trash or beer bottles out in the forest here, I bring them back home with me to recycle or throw in the garbage. So I brought that Guinness bottle home, but I couldn’t put it in the recycling bin. The truth is I watched the life force leave Devin ‘s body a swig at a time, like a bottle of Guinness trying to drown itself. He almost seemed like a metaphor for the cosmic universe. Something endlessly poured into him, something endlessly pouring out. Sometimes I still catch myself thinking, ‘Was he there at all in our 11 years together? Was I? Were we something together? Was he filling himself up or emptying himself out? Was I any part of what filled him, or was it me that emptied him? Did pieces of me go with him, into him, or did I just float away from Devin ? What’s the story?’
“I remember wishing idiotic things toward the end of our story, like, ‘I wish he could just drink me.’ I remember wishing I was a bottle of Guinness so that he wouldn’t have to think about what was happening to us, and I wouldn’t have to feel how bad it hurt that we couldn’t make it work. I never stopped loving Devin . I probably still love him. But the story of that love is dispersing, rearranging, shape shifting. I’m learning to lay his body down. Loving a drinker is like loving a river always leaving you for the ocean.
“I put a note in the Guinness bottle, capped it, and threw it out into the Pacific Ocean where I live, where my daughter Lily’s ashes swim. The note read, ‘We tried.’ I could have written and set to water the same note to my mother.”
Miller: Like Devin, you’ve – I’m not sure what the right verb is – flirted with death. Like Devin and your mother, you’ve dealt with addiction. But you’ve survived. What has saved you?
Yuknavitch: Some kind of cosmic joke that just doses us unevenly. I mean, that’s one kind of answer. One kind of answer is it’s random who survives, who doesn’t. It’s certainly not fair. There’s no justice logic to any of it. But another answer, if answers to these questions could be a palimpsest, there’s some layers of answer underneath that which would be probably closer to sacred to me … which is, I do have a life force that I’ve met.
And it has pulled me out from drowning or saved me at very difficult times in my life. It isn’t God, for me, and it isn’t another human. It’s probably not even a seal. It’s some kind of small fire in me that got born around my relationship to art. I just don’t want to leave the world of art or my turn making some while I’m here. And if there’s anybody else out there who feels that way about art, then I’m happy to stand in the space where you get to say it out loud, that that too could save your life.
Miller: I wonder if you could tell us a story of going sailing with a poet, now long past ex-boyfriend, in Dorena Lake near Eugene when you were in grad school?
Yuknavitch: Sure. It was a tumultuous relationship from the get go, but I chose it. I was in it. And this was toward the end of our relationship too, so things were not pretty already. But there was this invitation to go sailing at Dorena Lake, rent a boat and do it. And I don’t actually know why some men express to some women that they have “man knowledge” about things that they may or may not have any knowledge about. But I believed that he had man knowledge about sailing.
Miller: Do you not understand it? I mean, just the idea of impressing this person who you want to like you, who you want to think that you are impressive?
Yuknavitch: Yeah, but I didn’t say, “Let’s go sailing. I have ‘lady knowledge.’” No, I mean, again, on the surface level, I do understand that – one person trying to impress another. But I think there are layers underneath that are a little more troubling, like what is it we’re doing to each other. Anyway, so we go sailing. And there was some lack of skill happening, I would say, to be generous. And we did sail across Dorena Lake.
But at the tail end of getting across the lake, the sailboat capsized and the mast got stuck in the mud. I got thrown from the boat and went underwater. And when I came up, I thought I might be killed by the boat. I ended up so angry, a little bit scared but mostly angry. So instead of riding in the tow boat back to the other shore, I swam the whole lake in protest.
Miller: Can you read us a part of the new memoir that takes up from here and then starts, not to tell the story, but to make sense of the version of the story for you now?
Yuknavitch: [Reading excerpt from “Reading the Waves”]
“What I did was swim alongside the tow boat, an epic swim, the entire length of Dorena Lake. Miles, arriving at the shore to a bunch of cheering boys yelling, ‘Dude, did you see how far that lady swam?’ They high-fived each other as they practiced swearing, took in the image of the larger than life woman stomping onto the shore, squeezing water from her hair. They didn’t even look at the poet in the rescue boat, who sat hunched over and crumpled like a little man-monkey riding the rest of the way to shore.
“I could tell the story of what the poet did to me next in my blue Toyota pickup truck. Or I could tell the story of those cheering boys on the shore and how I must have looked like a wet valkyrie to them emerging from the water. They’d never seen anything like me. They kept saying that, shaking their heads like they’d really seen something. What would it take for the story to undergo a release, an adaptation, so that a woman emerging triumphantly from water might carry the heart of the matter, instead of the messed up fist of things that came.
“Why can’t I be the swimmer? Why can’t a woman be the epic novel of herself? I’m already a little embarrassed to write the sentences that way. I can feel an editor chasing down my choices. ‘Don’t rehash.’ I can hear my father scold me for bragging. ‘Who do you think you are?’ I can’t quite write that story of the epic woman swimmer, glorious shape shifting archetype, as a self. But for god damn sure I can create parts of her, and so I do, later in life. She is a girl who breathes underwater and moves around different epochs or moves epochs in a novel. She is a revisionary Joan of Arc. She is a girl from a wartorn Eastern European country who saves her own life by becoming an artist. She is a childless woman missing a leg, who will move whole populations beyond the word ‘mother.’ I’m not rehashing. I’m reshaping.”
Miller: That last paragraph there is so moving to me, the list of characters that you have created in your novels. What has fiction given you as an outlet?
Yuknavitch: Life. I was trying to describe it to a dear friend named Janice Lee, who is an amazing writer (and everyone should go buy her books right now), that for me the form or container of the novel has given me a space and a place to put the chaos that’s going on in my brain and my heart all the time. I don’t know how to make it stop. It gives me periods of instability in my life. But the novel holds it and gives it beauty, character, story and shape in a way that makes me able to bear my own life.
So I definitely prefer novel writing to nonfiction writing, in case anyone cares, for that reason. Because in nonfiction, you can play around with arrangements, shapes and beauty. But you don’t want to just lie like a rug. In fiction, anything is possible and you can take your life sediments – to go back to what you were asking earlier – rearrange them and create just this wonder. And I absolutely attach my being alive to the fact that novels exist.
Miller: But to go back to your serious discomfort or embarrassment at describing yourself as, in your words, an epic woman swimmer or a glorious shape shifting archetype. Certainly, that swim is epic. You’re a woman. That just seems objectively true to me, that you are an epic swimmer. But you’re allergic, it seemed there, from what you’re saying, to writing that about yourself. I’m wondering if you think it’s true? If it feels true to you? This whole project is I wanna rewrite, re-story my life in some ways. And you have an example here of something you did, which just seems incredible and epic. And then you acknowledge, “But I can’t write that it was epic.” Do you believe, first of all, that it was epic?
Yuknavitch: Dave, yes. I told you I had one goal, which is don’t cry.
Miller: You haven’t cried yet.
Yuknavitch: I haven’t.
Miller: I don’t want to make you cry.
Yuknavitch: You do. [Laughter] I think I’m … can I say, I’m closer?
Miller: You can say anything you want.
Yuknavitch: Yeah, I think I’m closer to being able to inhabit the sentence – which is pretty close for me because writing is my jam. But I also think I want to say a tiny thing about how I actually believe our ideas of selfhood are in dire need of radical shape shifting. So maybe this is me also asking, could I be a self in an epic story of a woman, differently than we’ve inherited. Because look where we’re at and the ego as center has nearly annihilated us. So maybe I’m shifting it loose enough I can ask the question.
Miller: This gets to a word that I hadn’t encountered before. I think maybe you made it up. When I googled it, I couldn’t find it anywhere else: “femascular.” What does it mean?
Yuknavitch: Yeah, I made it up.
Miller: OK, Google was right. It doesn’t exist. I mean, it does exist, but you made it up.
Yuknavitch: Yeah, I’m fond of making up words. I don’t understand why more people don’t do it, to be honest. I would love to have a conversation of only made up words. But anyway, femascular for me is an attempt to bypass the binary divisions of gender that keep putting us in the same arguments and loops. Although, bless the universe for the beauty and the courage of queerness and trans identity. That’s like the vanguard of human possibility in terms of gender. But the word femascular is like a refusal to separate, a refusal to claim one or the other, and an attempt to remind us that we all carry both all the time, and more than both.
Miller: What do you mean more than both?
Yuknavitch: There aren’t feminine and masculine, and that’s it. It’s just not true. We know this from science. We know it from personal observation. We know it from the plant world. We know it from the animal world. We know it from science. We know it in our hearts, but some people are chicken.
Miller: Thank you for ending there. You write at one point, “Language must ever expand so that more stories may emerge.” What’s the connection? What’s the connection between an expansion of our language and more possible stories?
Yuknavitch: You know how language, and how we use certain phrases, certain words or ideas, has shape shifted over time. Like, the world used to be flat. And everybody believed it, and that was truth. And the sentences reflected that. The same is true of our time. Then we’re also up against this hideous, present tense challenge of a whole bunch of people who are going in saying, “Language isn’t anything, it’s just, we’re power and that’s that.”
So the idea is that language is always organically changing, shifting, moving around. We can point to every point in history and say, look how it changed. So if that’s true, what if we participated more actively in that motion of change in the I Ching way? What if we stepped into it, instead of waiting for someone to tell us what everything means, and participated in the creative expansive, oceanic, cosmic possibility of language and story? Rather than, “Oh, that word doesn’t mean that anymore; it’s changed.” I mean, there’s got to be something more interesting to language than that. And since I love story space, that’s where I want to be doing the work.
Miller: That earlier memoir that we talked about, “The Chronology of Water,” is being made into a film by Kristen Stewart. It’ll be, I think, her directorial debut for a feature. So far, the only visual elements I’ve been able to see of the film are just one single still shot. Have you seen more of it?
Yuknavitch: No, I mean, maybe I’ve seen a few more still shots than other humans, but not a lot, no.
Miller: Have you thought about what it’s going to be like to have this new version of yourself be out there in the world and to have so many more people, who maybe haven’t heard of you and haven’t read you yet, be exposed to a version of your life?
Yuknavitch: Yeah, actually pretty early on I understood that it’s not a version of me or my life at all. It’s more like this: you know how musicians riff off of each other’s work? Or artists or writers all the time? It’s that. It’s one artist who’s riffing off of something I made and making her own autonomous, whatever weird, beautiful thing over here.
And in that way, artists help each other keep going. But I don’t even think it’s me or my story. I don’t even think of it that way. I’m just curious what her piece of art will look like. I support her, I wish her the best and I’m positive it won’t be dull.
Miller: Do you think you would have had the same idea about that 25 years ago?
Yuknavitch: No.
Miller: Lidia Yuknavitch, it was a real pleasure talking with you. Thank you very much for giving us a big chunk of your time.
Yuknavitch: The gratitude area is mine. Thank you so much.
Miller: That’s Lidia Yuknavitch. Her new book is the memoir “Reading the Waves.”
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