The Chronology of Water

Description

From the debris of her troubled early life, Lidia Yuknavitch weaves an astonishing tale of survival. It is a life that navigates, and transcends, abuse, addiction, self-destruction and the crushing loss of a stillborn child. A kind of memoir that is also a paean to the pursuit of beauty, self-expression, desire - for men and women - and the exhilaration of swimming, The Chronology of Water lays a life bare.

Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of the novels The Book of Joan,The Small Backs of Children and Dora: A Headcase. Her highly acclaimed memoir, The Chronology of Water, was a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for Creative Non-fiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Awards' Readers' Choice. Her TED talk, 'The Beauty of Being a Misfit', has been watched over two million times. Lidia teaches in Oregon, where she lives with her husband and their son. She is a very good swimmer. @LidiaYuknavitch | lidiayuknavitch.net

A brutal beauty bomb and a true love song. Rich with story, alive with emotion, both merciful and utterly merciless, I am forever altered by every stunning page. This is the book I'm going to press into everyone's hands for years to come. This is the book I've been waiting to read all of my life -- CHERYL STRAYED, author of WILD Rendered with incredible grace . . . Like water, the memoir takes on an unpredictable journey . . . This is a story grounded in womanhood and what it means to be a woman in this world where women are all too often victimised by those who are meant to care for us most . . . Entrancing -- ROXANE GAY Lidia Yuknavitch sets off, fiercely and unrelentingly towards the deep end. Here are phrases of nerve-jangling beauty, moments of sly humour and lines so raw you want to look away. The Chronology of Water is a story about surviving, destroying, becoming, and ultimately, falling in love with the written word. It's a marvel -- JESS KIDD, author of HIMSELF and THE HOARDER Something about this story - the goddamn gorgeous language, the raw power of its brutality - gave me so much comfort and solace. In Yuknavitch's word embrace, I felt the magic of self-acceptance and self-love, and the crazy-wonderful beauty of life * * Huffington Post * * I've read The Chronology of Water, cover to cover, a dozen times. I am still reading it. And I will, most likely, return to it for inspiration and ideas, and out of sheer admiration, for the rest of my life. The book is extraordinary -- CHUCK PALAHNIUK Yuknavitch's dark memoir is both exorcism and dissection, a raw and visceral account with the emphasis on physicality. . . . An unnerving but bracing memoir about her drive to survive and find her own voice * * Herald * * Lidia Yuknavitch is my favorite new writer . . . Genius. The tone is a combination of high and low, with some of the writing literary and metaphorical, some conversational and shock-jockey, all of it fueled by rage and pain and love and art and transformation * * The Atlantic * * Bold and highly unconventional . . . Hot, gritty, unrelenting in its push to dismantle the self and then, somehow, put the self back together again - gets not just under a reader's skin but seeps all the way into her bloodstream * * Publishers Weekly * * I love this book and I am thankful that Lidia Yuknavitch has written it for me and for everyone else who has ever had to sometimes kind of work at staying alive. It's about the body, brain, and soul of a woman who has managed to scratch up through the slime and concrete and crap of life in order to resurrect herself. The kind of book Janis Joplin might have written if she had made it through the fire - raw, tough, pure, more full of love than you thought possible and sometimes even hilarious. This is the book Lidia Yuknavitch was put on the planet to write for us -- REBECCA BROWN, author of THE GIFTS OF THE BODY