Reading the Waves
A Memoir
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5.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
The frank and revealing memoir of a writer who draws from her own creativity to heal.
"I believe our bodies are carriers of experience," Lidia Yuknavitch writes in her provocative memoir Reading the Waves. "I mean to ask if there is a way to read my own past differently, using what I have learned from literature: how stories repeat and reverberate and release us from the tyranny of our mistakes, our traumas, and our confusions."
Drawing on her background -- her father's abuse, her complicated dynamic with her disabled mother, the death of her child, her sexual relationships with men and women -- and her creative life as an author and teacher, Yuknavitch has come to understand that by using the power of literature and storytelling to reframe her memories, she can loosen the bonds that have enslaved her emotional growth. Armed with this insight, she allows herself to look with the eye of an artist at the wounds she suffered and come to understand the transformational power this has to restore her soul.
By turns candid and lyrical, stoic and forgiving, blunt and evocative, Reading the Waves reframes memory to show how crucial this process can be to gaining a deeper understanding of ourselves.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist Yuknavitch (Thrust) approaches her past "not as facts, but as fictions" in this stunning, genre-bending self-portrait. Drawing inspiration from Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison, Yuknavitch eschews the conventions of traditional memoir to explore the idea that "bodies are carriers of experiences" in lyrical, short story–like chapters. The nonchronological vignettes highlight pivot points in Yuknavitch's life, including the murder of an older cousin when she was a child, and her own sexual assault, which drove Yuknavitch to "spend my life creating literature as resistance" since "the murdered woman is everywhere in art and life." Other anecdotes—of Yuknavitch swallowing pennies, rocks, and seeds as an adolescent, and of the staggering pain she felt when her daughter died—propel her on a journey away from numbness and toward an awareness that language offers outlets to "explore the disruptions, eruptions, many paths rewordings we might invent" to lighten the burden of the past. With a fiercely feminist outlook and moody, evocative prose that never tilts into preciousness, Yuknavitch delivers a gorgeous ode to the grunt work of self-discovery. It's a major achievement.
