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Chronology Of Water: A Memoir (2011)

by Lidia Yuknavitch(Favorite Author)

4.14 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

1283007819 (ISBN13: 9781283007818)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Hawthorne Books

review 1: The first half of this book does some stuff I have almost never seen done so artfully, starkly, heartwrenchingly. The looping images of Lidia as a swimmer return again and again to tie up her stories across time, from losing her newborn daughter to being abused as a little girl. The abuse is addressed in waves as it returns to affect Lidia differently across stages of her life -- her mid-book memories of her father in which she tries to remember him as a human instead of a monster actually had me holding on for dear life, they are so brave and impossible. The second half turns into something else, and I'm not sure why...once Lidia gets into the parts of her life in which she started having literary success and meeting famous writers, the books goes from gutsy to humbleb... morerag/name-dropping. Why?? Seriously, I couldn't understand it. A few of the later chapters end up achieving some of the same power as the earlier half, but it's not woven as tightly. I did appreciate how self-aware she seems by the end, when she reveals some amoral choices and says, "What did you expect? I was still me."
review 2: OH my god, this book was amazing. It was exactly what I needed to pick myself up off the ground and say, hey, you're not alone, and life is life, and what happens happens and you can be a fucking badass like Lidia and Lidia's a fucking badass so why not be awesome like her and accept your failures and laugh at them and ridicule yourself but in a way that still lets you keep moving on and growing and becoming a super awesome cool lady. So, this is probably my new favorite book, and I would buy it for a friend, and I would read it three more times, and I cried on the bus / tried to stop myself from crying on the bus while reading it, and I will most definitely quote it when I publish my own book. This book, is my friend. I haven't had a book that was my friend in a really, really long time. BUT this book? Definitely. less

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