Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir Reading the Waves is a literary exploration of memory and the transformative power of storytelling. In a book she describes as “not a memoir,” but “a space of narrative transmography,” Yuknavitch explores storytelling and truth, mothers and daughters, and the love and grief that shapes us.
“I mean to ask if there is a way to read my own past differently,” she writes, “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.” The book asks many such questions, and doing so presents a generous gift to the reader: an invitation to rewrite our own histories as a means of redefining ourselves.
I spoke with Lidia on Zoom about the stories we carry in our bodies, searching for the sentences hidden beneath sentences, and shapeshifting.
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Liz Iversen: One thing that struck me about this book is that there are so many incredible acts of love portrayed in it. Your then-husband, Andy, hired a private investigator to investigate the death of your previous husband of 11 years, Devin. I found that to be a beautiful act of love. And then you climbed up a construction crane, as Devin had done before his fatal fall, and remembered him, another profound act. This memoir is bookended by Devin. You receive an envelope containing the information the private investigator found in the beginning, and you open the envelope at the end. What made you decide to structure the book in this way?
Lidia Yuknavitch: That's a great question, because it raises the possibility that our pain and loss has a love story threaded through it. I really like that idea. I think it might be true. But to get to your question, I'm not sure I really decided. I think what happened is what happens to me most times when I'm writing a book. The process itself started to yield the possibility that part of this story would be a little bit of homage, or a little bit elegiac, to some people and some places that have marked me in terms of loss or pain. The structure emerged from the writing process itself. And then I used those lines from women writers at the beginning like flashlights, and those helped me make arrangements and patterns.
LI: You quoted a lot of women writers in this book: Joy Harjo, Jeanette Winterson, Clarice Lispector, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Maggie Nelson, Toni Morrison, to name some. Who would you say have been your greatest literary heroes, and how has their work helped inspire and inform your own?
LY: You're naming a lot of them, which is why I included them in the story threads, because they've been so important to me. I'm not sure I believe in inherited definitions of heroes and heroism anymore. I think of heroism as a collective thing now, and I think of storytelling space as a good place where we can hunt for our joined efforts, our joined braveries, our joined ways in which we help carry things with each other. So I've really changed my ideas about heroism at this part of my life. But those writers you named are clearly a big fucking deal to me because they guide me. The other writers and artists that guide me these days are people I'm working with collaboratively. They're just as important to me.
LI: The introduction to your previous memoir, A Chronology of Water, mentions a writing group you were in while drafting that book. Are you still writing with that group? How has community played a role in your writing life?
LY: Well, like most organisms in life, that group had its time and place and then dissolved and became something else. And I'm still in touch with some of those people, and I will love them forever. But it emerged and dissolved like everything does. And what's been most important to me in the last ten to twenty years has been work I do with this organism we created called Corporeal Writing. In Reading the Waves, I acknowledged that they are my squad, my coworkers, my heart and art humans. Our entire existence is about helping other people find what's powerful for them. We're the conduit. We're the place where energy can connect people. And that's been community for me, most recently.
LI: Corporeal Writing offers workshops centered on writing “by and through the body.” How might those workshops be different from traditional workshops?
LY: They're very different from traditional workshops because we write collectively and collaboratively, and we hold different questions at the center. Not questions about established craft or how to enter the market. But questions more like: The stories you're carrying around in your shoulder or in your hip right now–they want to come out. What are they? They're either giving you pain or they're making you not sleep at night, or you're just experiencing a deep love for your own rib cage right now. Let's get in there and see what stories exist. I actually believe we're all walking around carrying everything that's happened to us as stories in our bodies. So that's the premise. But in the last five years or so, with the arrival of the writer and healer and all-around perfect person Janice Lee to Corporeal Writing, we've been shapeshifting a little. What started off as embodied writing practices and collective writing has expanded to include: What is healing? What is dreaming? What is imagination?
LI: That theme of the stories that we carry in our bodies is such an important aspect of this memoir. You wrote that you carried the story of Devin in your body for thirty years. How does it feel to you to hold these stories in your body? And how, if at all, are you able to release them?
LY: I'm just like everybody else – I don't always know what I'm holding onto for too long. And if it's sad or difficult, we sort of pretend on the outside like we've gotten past it, or we've healed, and we may not know we're still carrying it. I'm that way, too. I'm not a wizard, I don't know much. But when I was inside writing and storytelling and I was asking questions about memory and transmogrify – which is also a big theme in this story – it started coming to the surface that, wow, I've been holding on to some pretty deeply painful stories so hard for so long because I loved, and I didn't know what to do.
And it's this idea that sometimes it's hard to release, like you say, or let go of a story we've been carrying around too long, because it's so familiar. You kind of love it. It's yours. It happened and it's yours. So I'm probably still releasing. I'm not, like, cured. I can't wave my wizard wand. But I've understood that I'm in the process, and that might be a step.
LI: Going back to that idea of transmogrify and shapeshifting, you wrote about narrative as a shapeshifting space that carries with it “the possibility of arrangement, de-arrangement and rearrangement, as does language itself.” How did you arrive at this idea of narrative as a shapeshifting space?
LY: I write novels, so I spent my adult life in fiction writing. It's not hard to imagine that novels are shape shifting space, because you're always imagining and creating and making story forms. So that's where I learned it. But other illuminating writers, like Virginia Woolf, for example – or more recently, Rebecca Solnit – they write a lot about how what happened to you is true. Yes, this earthquake happened. Or yes, this terrible power system emerged. But that's not the only thing that emerged. Let's look under it, and to the side of it, and above it, and within it. What are the smaller story threads that create their own plot and their own action? Sometimes, you have to just look differently for what other shapes and patterns are there. So, those are two writers I would name who, I am definitely down with their vibe. I have been inspired by them. If you read any book by Virginia Woolf, the plot is tiny. What's large are the little-bitty moments and emotional sensory perceptions around the little bit of plot. She makes those amplified, and beautiful, and loud. The little plot thing is like a pinpoint. And people's dailyness, like sewing, or eating, or watching a wave, or watching a moth die, gets big. I'm interested in those rearrangements of how we make meaning in storytelling.
LI: What does your process look like in terms of arranging and rearranging?
LY: I don't want you to be scared. [laughs] No, I'm kidding. I write in small pieces and move them around until I start seeing patterns and echoes, and then small pieces start growing. They start talking to each other or making patterns. I follow the patterns, or follow the images, or follow the ways in which echoes are happening, until it starts coming to form. And those become chapters, or essays, or characters, or whatever. And when you have enough of that, and you have many pages, it starts talking back to you. You start saying, “Oh, this can't be the beginning. Why would that be the beginning?” And you move something, and you're like, “Oh my God, now I see the ending.”
LI: I could kind of feel that in this collection, because the flow of the stories is wavelike. One memory churns something up that is carried along to the next wave of memory.
LY: Exactly.
LI: Was the wavelike structure something you were conscious of as you wrote?
LY: Yes, always. Since I was about four. I didn’t always understand it when I was four, or fourteen, or twenty-four, or thirty-four, but I see now that it's always been for me a central metaphor and a central image. It's guided me my whole life. But that's not as important as each person out there figuring out what their core images and metaphors are. We all have them, but it sometimes takes awhile to find those fuckers.
LI: Do you think that yours being the wave is related to your experience as a competitive swimmer?
LY: I think so, because back when I was a competitive swimmer, I definitely felt strong, and free, and away from the abuse of my home, and good in water. Even now, in my life, I feel better in water than I do on land.
LI: Reading the Waves is also a book about memory. You wrote that memory poses a crisis of representation, where the desire to capture ‘what really happened’ meets the desire to build a story that will help us get on with our lives, especially around difficult experiences," and there is a kind of tension or schism. How do you navigate that tension in your writing?
LY: Memory, and imagination, and story space, and maybe meditation – but absolutely making art in any form – these are realms where that tension or schism can stretch out a little bit, so you can see it differently. You can kind of walk around it and stand in different positions to that tension. Making art opens up a portal, or a sphere, that you can get inside of and explore in ways that don't work in your everyday life. That's how I would describe it. It feels very true for me, and I've seen it be true for other people when we're doing it together, too.
LI: What other forms of art are you exploring?
LY: Visual art, painting, drawing. And I find it in other artists, like musicians, and sculptors, and filmmakers. All art has what I'm talking about. I'm personally only able to do writing and drawing and painting. I kind of suck at everything else. I'm probably the worst poet on the planet. I've tried – it's just terrible. It's laughable.
LI: I felt like I was digging through your book trying to find tips to uncover your writing process. You wrote, “So many sentences are hiding underneath other sentences.” How do you find the sentences underneath the other sentences?
LY: We do this a lot at Corporeal Writing. This is another skill that Janice Lee has that’s just extraordinary. We take on a single page of your writing, or even a single paragraph, or even a single sentence, and we start pulling words apart, and asking the question: When you pull these two words apart, do you feel any other words between them? Or, when you bring the question of, “What did it smell like?” to this paragraph, do any smell senses come in – or sound senses, or taste senses? Did that unlock anything? Or we ask questions like: Here's the scene you wrote, and here's what happened. What was in the periphery? What was just outside the window? If you told this story from when you were ten years old, what would it be? If you told it from when you were twenty years old, what would it be? Does it change when you tell it at forty? We ask questions like that, and the lines on the page start vibrating – like, holy shit, there’s a whole nother book in here.
LI: You wrote in Reading the Waves that you wonder differently at sixty than you did when you were younger. How has it shifted?
LY: There's a lot more patience and a wider-angle lens. And also, a new ability to look in the peripheries – like we were just talking about – and smaller spaces, and underneath, and behind, and above. Whereas, as a younger writer, I had this, “Plow forward with your creative force!” and take names, and “never surrender” kind of energy. Which is cool – it’s why I am where I am today, because I had that propulsion in youth of creative force. But what I have now is creative eros, which is a kind of erotic power to expand, and open, and be relational to everything else, not just myself. That's profoundly different energy.
LI: When I read your work, I’m compelled by the stories you tell, but perhaps even more so, I find myself in awe and wonder of the person you are – who is someone who’s experienced so much grief and trauma – and yet you're able to write with such love, even about people in your life who have hurt you. I wonder, to what extent is the work of a memoirist about shaping the words on the page, and to what extent is it about the work of the soul – one's experiences, and growth, and our ability to feel compassion and forgiveness?
LY: As an artist, you're working with forms and storytelling space. You work very hard at that and bring as much integrity as you can to that – but it also has to do with your internal landscape and what's going on there. Maybe some writers can just make pages and not feel anything – certainly I'm not one of them. I guess I want to join the other writers in the world – and artists – who are contributing to the streams of storytelling that keep us open and able to imagine. And in order to stay open and able to imagine, you have to risk telling the story of the hurt. You have to risk letting the story of the hurt go, if you want to keep contributing with others to possibility and imagination. It ain't easy, and I fail at it a lot – I should say that out loud. But it's what I'm trying for again and again.
LI: You wrote, “What if we could read our own past, our memories, even our bodies as if they too were books open to endless interpretation?” Do you think that's really possible, and is that something that you were experimenting with in this book?
LY: I absolutely think it's possible, and I absolutely think I am experimenting with that in this book. I also think it's kind of our responsibility right now to ask what we could become that's different from what we've been. I think there's a social and emotional imperative for us to shapeshift right now, because the old ways of doing things and the old stories aren't holding. And maybe I won't live to see it, but fuck it, I can go down contributing to the effort. It's not really important if I'm around to see the changes. It's important that we contribute to the process.
LI: What do you mean by “the old stories aren't holding”?
LY: Old stories about heroes, or what is brave, or what is masculine and feminine, or what is gender, or what is art, or what's the usefulness of humans. We’ve been carrying these central stories, and even though we got to the point where we can challenge some of them – the Civil Rights Movement is an example – they’re still weighing us down in ways that are making it hard for us to change and grow. So I'm happy to help hold the questions open. What would real change and real growth look like? It may mean shape-shifting kind of radically. I'm definitely waiting for my tail to grow in.
LI: You write that “anything that can be put to story can be storied differently.” How do writers know when we’ve found the story that we really want to tell?
LY: Well, of course I'm going to say you tend to feel it in your body somewhere, because that's my thermometer. I feel something differently in my body when I'm vibing with my deepest desire for artistic expression. But not everybody is going to feel it that way, and I understand that. But I would say practice, not product. I would say making art is a life practice, not “I want to be published this year, I want a book, I want…” Making art is a life practice, and doing it with other people is more important than seeking fame and fortune. Fame and fortune is another story that needs to die.
LI: Speaking of fame and fortune, your first memoir is being adapted for film by Kristen Stewart. Were you involved in the filmmaking process at all? What was that like for you if so?
LY: I was involved early on in the incubator stage where ideas are shooting back and forth, and images – that imaginal stage. I was pretty involved then. I'm not so much involved now, but I can say that for me it's like a separate artist is making a separate piece of art that riffs off something I made, kind of how jazz artists riff off each other. That’s how it feels to me. She's so brilliant and so unique, I have no doubt it will be fascinating, and very artful, and brilliant, and not dull.
LI: I am so looking forward to that. What are you working on now?
LY: I'm kind of at the bottom of the ocean right now in my personal life, but I have seen some things down there. I think another novel is starting to form inside my abdomen area, and some nonfiction – not memoir nonfiction, more nonfiction as an invitation to readers to ask some good questions about things. But mostly a novel. I prefer fiction times a million.
