Kapitel 1
Diving into the Depths of Memory and Trauma
Lidia Yuknavitch's memoir "The Chronology of Water" has been described as "a brutal beauty bomb and a true love song" by Cheryl Strayed, while Chuck Palahniuk admits to reading it cover-to-cover a dozen times. This isn't just another addiction story or recovery narrative-it's something far more profound. Diana Abu-Jaber calls it "flooded with light and incandescent beauty," cutting through readers' hearts with its raw honesty. Like its title suggests, this memoir flows not chronologically but in waves, circling back to moments of trauma and transcendence, creating a reading experience as immersive as swimming itself. The book has garnered a cult following among writers and artists for its unflinching portrayal of grief, sexuality, and the redemptive power of art. Perhaps most remarkably, it's a book that makes you feel less alone in your own darkness-a rare literary achievement that transforms personal pain into universal connection.
Kapitel 2
When Water Becomes Memory
The day my daughter was stillborn, a nurse guided me to a shower where warm water fell on my broken body. Ripped from vagina to rectum, sewn closed, I sat bleeding, crying, peeing, vomiting. "I became water." After 38 hours of labor with my dead baby, they placed her on my chest like a living child. I kissed her, held her, talked to her-her eyelashes so long, cheeks still red, lips a rosebud. When they took her away, my last thought: "So this is death. Then a death life is what I choose."
Memory doesn't happen chronologically-it's "fragments and repetitions and pattern formations. Language and water have this in common." When your baby is born dead, there are no words in that story. So you collect rocks instead. Not just any rocks-you go to riverbanks, deep woods, ocean shores. You let your imagination transform what you see: gray becomes ashen, rings mean luck, red rocks are earthblood. You fill your house with these palm-sized worlds, build labyrinths on your floor, ignore what guests think. You name them, bathe them weekly, carry them in your pockets.
The rocks carry "the chronology of water," simultaneously living and dead in your hands, revealing "an underlying tone and plot to your life underneath the one you've been told." They show you that life isn't linear but circular and image-bound, flowing like water around the significant events that shape us.
This is how grief works-not in neat stages or tidy resolutions, but in waves that crash over you when least expected. Sometimes you're treading water, sometimes drowning, sometimes floating peacefully. The metaphor of water becomes a way to understand not just grief but all of life's experiences-fluid, powerful, capable of both destruction and sustenance.
Kapitel 3
The Silencing of a Girl's Voice
In my childhood home, one corner of the living room was designated the "crybaby corner"-a place of shame where you stood facing the wall when you cried. My sister would stop crying almost immediately when sent there. But I was different. I cried constantly, epically, about everything-bedtime, strangers, school, food, music, Christmas trees, Halloween, public restrooms, bees, injuries, darkness.
But it was my father who stole my voice. The sound of his belt on my sister's bare skin made me bite my lip and rock in the corner of my room, sometimes banging my head against the wall. My sister's silence during these whippings haunted me. Afterward, we'd share silent bubble baths, drawing pictures on each other's backs with our fingernails.
After my sister left when I was 10, I didn't speak to anyone outside my immediate family until I was 13. When called on at school, I'd look up with a throat "the size of a straw," unable to produce sound. If forced to speak, I'd stand on one leg like a stork, arm behind my head in an "L" shape, rocking until I lost balance-"Little bird ballet. Little girl making an 'L' for Lidia with her arm. Anything but speech."
My voice first emerged on paper-in a red notebook hidden under my bed where I wrote "pictures and true things and lies" about my father's angry voice, my love of swimming, my attraction to girls, my jealousy of friends, my absent mother, and letters to my gone sister. At 11, I wrote: "In the house/alone in my bed/my arms ache. My sister is gone/my mother is gone/my father designs buildings/in the room next to mine/he is smoking. I wait for 5 a.m./I pray to leave the house/I pray to swim." My voice was coming, born from solitude and water.
The silencing of girls and women happens in countless ways-through shame, through violence, through the erasure of their experiences. But sometimes, in that silence, another kind of voice emerges-one that speaks through the body, through art, through whatever medium allows expression when speech itself has been stolen.
Kapitel 4
Swimming as Salvation and Identity
Swimming defined my identity-"everything collected in my memory curls like water around events in my life." At my senior prom in Florida, I arm-wrestled five boys, losing only once, before we all got drunk and went skinny-dipping in the competition pool where I trained four hours daily. My body was stronger than ever, masculine in its power-"I looked like someone's son. The biceps of a son. The jaw. The shoulders. My hair whiting out gender. Breastless."
When I was 15, my father announced we were moving from Washington to Gainesville, Florida, supposedly because Randy Reese, "the best swim coach in the nation," was there. I couldn't understand abandoning our Northwestern home for "a strip of sand and alligators," leaving behind my beloved coach Ron Koch-the only man who'd ever shown me kindness, who'd explained menstruation to me when I thought I was dying, who celebrated my victories and comforted my losses.
Florida's water was all wrong-tap water like "swampshit," slippery shower water, warm rain that left choking steam, ocean "the temperature of urine," and lukewarm pools "like a giant bath gone dull." Randy Reese barely noticed me despite my efforts. Unlike Koch's warmth, Reese showed only clipboard numbers and administered "licks" with kickboards for every pound overweight before meets. The pool became "a place of shame" indistinguishable from home.
My swimming dreams died when Jimmy Carter's Olympic boycott took away even the possibility of "swimmer glory." I hated everyone-Randy Reese, Jimmy Carter, God, my math teacher, and "my father most of all."
Swimming was more than sport-it was escape, identity, and the one place where my body felt powerful rather than violated. In the water, I could be something other than a daughter, a victim, a girl. I could be pure movement, pure strength. The loss of that dream wasn't just disappointing-it was devastating because it took away the one arena where I had agency, where I could define myself on my own terms.
Kapitel 5
Learning to Ride Through Terror
When I was 10, to cheer me up after my sister left, my father brought home a hot pink Schwinn with a banana seat and handlebar streamers. I watched through the window as he pulled it from the station wagon's trunk. "I thought it was perhaps the most beautiful thing I had ever seen-except for my green metal toy army jeep." Its hot pink glory, streamers like hair, big white banana seat made me gasp.
But I didn't know how to ride a bike. At all. Scared of most physical activities besides swimming, I'd even failed at tricycles, "flat footing the thing along" until my disgusted father hid it in the garage. So despite the bike's beauty, I felt only terror when he announced, "It's time to learn to ride a bike."
After many attempts, my father let go of the handlebars and held the back of the bike. I wobbled, tipped over, and fell knee-first. He grabbed me by my shirt and lifted me upward. "Don't cry, for christ's sake," he said. "You better not cry."
We practiced until sunset, when I thanked god for lowering the sun. But my father wasn't finished. "Now we'll try the hill," he said, turning me toward the steep incline near our cul-de-sac.
At the top, he turned me around on my beautiful bike and held the seat. I shook, staring down what looked like a roller coaster drop. He gave brief instructions about back-pedaling to brake and turning at the bottom.
"Daddy, I can't do it," I said, my bottom lip quivering.
"You sure as hell can," he said, and pushed.
The terror induced an altered state-"psychedelic drugs put you in realms where language fails to describe emotion." I screamed all the way down, gripping the handlebars so hard my palms stung. Nothing seemed to slow me down. I crashed into a row of mailboxes.
The next day, he made me get back on the bike, insisting, "You have to get right back on and conquer your fear." Again he pushed me down the hill. "Between terror and rage I chose rage." Halfway down, I closed my eyes, let go of the handlebars and spread my arms wide, feeling the wind through my heart. I wiped out spectacularly, scraping my entire body, but I didn't cry.
"For years and years, after that."
This brutal lesson became a metaphor for life-sometimes you're pushed down terrifying hills before you're ready, and you have to choose between terror and rage. Sometimes the only way through is to close your eyes, let go, and feel the wind, even knowing you'll crash at the bottom.
Kapitel 6
Burning Saints and Finding Voice
At thirteen, I confessed "my father secrets" to a priest, who told me I shouldn't tell lies. "Honor thy father. Say seven Hail Marys. It's wicked to make up stories."
For three days and nights, I prayed desperately to God-"I prayed so hard I choked on the spit in my mouth." I clenched my hands until they reddened, dug my fingernails into my flesh until "little scarlet moons appeared," and shut my eyes so tightly I thought my forehead would bleed. "My head, my heart, everything on the inside was burning."
Swimming brought no relief: "No matter how many times I entered the cool waters of the pool, I left the wet with a fire in me."
Mercy didn't come from "god the father" but from a book-Saint Joan of Arc by Vita Sackville-West, given to me by my sister when she left our father's house. Though much of the book terrified me at thirteen, I knew Joan's story from my sister's explanation: "Girl woman with a war in her. Voice of a father in her head."
On page 341, I read how instead of a crown of thorns, they placed a tall paper cap on Joan's head. She didn't die until the fire reached her head. Witnesses claimed to see various things, including "a dove leaving her skull." Despite the accelerants used, "her entrails and heart would not go to ash," forcing the executioner to throw them into the Seine River.
Reading this at thirteen, after being told to honor my father and that making up stories was wicked, I became "the rest of my life a burning girl." Joan's burning became my new religion-"Her face skyward. Her faith muscled up like a holy war." I took this image into my heart and "left belief to the house of father forever." I didn't hate the fire-I hated those who didn't believe her, the father who let her burn, and increasingly, men in general: "The more I was around them, the more I came close to spontaneously combusting."
In Joan of Arc, I found a different kind of faith-not in the father god who demanded obedience and silence, but in the fiery girl who spoke her truth despite the consequences. I found permission to burn with my own voice, to let the fire of my experience transform me rather than consume me.
Kapitel 7
The Salvation of Art and Writing
I didn't want to tell you this. I was going to hide these words. Ask me about my life as a sexualized body and I can tell endless stories. But ask me about writing-that's private. Writing is the fire of me, born from where life and death happened in me.
I considered quitting graduate school, but something wouldn't let me. My intellect appeared-a woman I'd never met, with "sassy red reading glasses"-my father's daughter. That night, words gushed from my body like a loosened blood clot. I wrote story after story until it became a book. "There was no inside out. There were words and there was my body, and I could see through my own skin."
My first book beat my dissertation to print. I called it "Her Other Mouths." I did finish my dissertation too-"Allegories of Violence"-and both were published. The intellectual me and blood-bodied me began to know each other. But my marriage collapsed. While Devin was in Vietnam, I took to bed for days, eating sleeping pills, until a friend broke down my door.
Though I failed at making a home, I made something else: a wordhouse. The first was a literary journal-not small, white and pristine like Virginia Quarterly Review, but huge, nine-by-twelve, perfect-bound, four-color counterculture. Each issue had themes meant to deconstruct the "literary journal"-Obscenitydivinity, Blow, Varieties of Violence, Alien. My smart-as-crap friends and I taught ourselves everything-editing, design, layout, typesetting-making every page an event horizon where image and text warred or danced.
We destroyed the sanctity of the literary page while liberating art's noise and heat. We put Annie Sprinkle and Andres Serrano next to ex-cons and recovering addicts. Everyone had day jobs, stayed up too late making the big books, and spent too much time cursing at Kinko's employees. We won awards and grants. It was a fast-burning supernova that I fucking loved-the first thing I ever loved without spreading my legs for it.
Through the wordhouse, I met writers who'd read my work and found voices that matched my internal bloodsong. We huddled in corners at conferences, drinking and plotting art secrets like underground societies. These people were my tribe, sacred. I understand why people join gangs or develop prison societies-a little bit outside is where some people feel each other. We do it to replace family, to erase and remake our origins, to say "I too was here."
Art became the place where I could make meaning from chaos, where I could transform pain into beauty, where I could find my voice after years of silence. In the community of other artists, I found a family that accepted and celebrated the very parts of me that my birth family had tried to silence.
Kapitel 8
Finding Family in Unexpected Places
They say every woman marries a version of her father. My father fractured all the women's hearts in our home with his rage. Looking back at the men I've loved, it's with a split heart. If I understand family love at all, I learned it first from Michael, whom I remember in every part of my life. When I first saw him painting with Phillip, something happened in my heart. Michael taught me to love men without rage, to love holidays, to cook with joy. Through Michael and Dean, I learned a new kind of family-one made by choice rather than blood. My son Miles was conceived in their house, the only place I ever felt the word "home" in my heart. It's enough to break a heart open-the thousands of ways to love men, the possibility of making family any way you like.
After being fired in San Diego and rehired in Oregon, we drove north with baby Miles and my friend Virginia. When our Saab broke down in Weed, Andy noticed and came back for us in the U-Haul. In Oregon, at a Holiday Inn, I felt Miles' thunderous lifeforce against my heart-the exact opposite of the heart implosion I felt when my daughter died. We were driving to a house Andy had found online in the Bull Run Wilderness. "It's sanctuary," he'd said. The house was made from two octagonals surrounded by forest, with 360-degree windows in the sleeping loft showing nothing but trees. It was the green world, like Shakespeare meant-a magical metamorphosis. In this sanctuary, Miles slept near our writing desks, Christmas wasn't traumatic, and despite new-parent exhaustion, Andy and I created prolifically-I wrote a novel and seven stories; he wrote a novel and three screenplays. Green world indeed.
I know I'm making Andy sound like some magical mansavior. But it's the effect of meeting your equal-the astonishment that I love men. We're not some movie relationship. We fought hard in the beginning-me like a woman whose father betrayed her and whose mother abandoned her; him like a man without a father whose mother's heart didn't quite reach him. We fought because we could take it, because something waited on the other side. Couples don't like admitting to fights-we want our relationships to look sanitized and pretty. But there's fighting that isn't ugly, where anger becomes energy given form rather than targeting a human.
As a toddler, I'd jump into any water I saw-pools, rivers, lakes-then sink like a stone until someone (usually my eyerolling sister) pulled me out. At three, my mother signed me up for swim lessons, but my father drove me to Lake Washington, stripped me, and threw me in. In November. I was the youngest kid there. My son Miles, at seven, loves swimming pools but can't actually swim. He wears goggles and a life vest, splashes around making uncoordinated circles, and says "Lidia, look, I'm doing swimming!" Meanwhile, at his age, I was winning trophies. If any seal-like kids at the pool even glance at Miles, I shoot them my father's death look. My father never learned to swim.
Kapitel 9
Learning to Live on Land
There's a place on the Oregon coast called Gleneden Beach with a resort called Salishan. It's the only place my family visited together that actually worked. My father would sit on our hotel balcony watching the ocean, looking peaceful. We'd spend hours in the resort pool-my mother side-stroking her weightless swan body, my sister and I playing like normal kids, my father wading in up to his chin but never venturing to the deep end. We returned for five years until my sister left. I didn't know then that Salishan refers to endangered Native American languages of the Pacific Northwest. The word embedded itself in my heart differently than other words-I'd whisper it when hurt or scared, hoping for magic.
Years later, I brought Andy and five-year-old Miles there. As we approached, my heart let loose at the sight of the Douglas Firs and the smell of salt air. Miles ran around our room in excitement, found the white terrycloth robes, put one on, went to the balcony and declared, "This is the life." At the pool, Miles kept saying "Salishan." Words carry oceans on their small backs. In that pool of my childhood hope, Miles announced his new game: "I'm going to put my whole head underwater." With goggles on and holding his nose, he counted to three, took the hugest breath ever, and submerged completely. When we rushed up for air, we were both laughing. Andy came over for a group hug. "Again!" Miles said, and we did it over and over. In this water with my boy and my man, I almost couldn't breathe. It was a family. Mine. It's a small tender thing, the simplicity of loving. I am learning to live on land.
I wonder who was rooting for me. For the first time since I was fourteen, I'm watching Super-8 films of myself swimming and racing that my father took. They've been sitting in a cardboard box since his death in 2003. Watching this little woman swim for her life is strange-is she swimming away from something or toward something? What you'll never see in these films is how far I had to swim to come back to a simple chlorinated pool where I might just be. I swim laps three or four times weekly now at the Clackamas Aquatic Center. It feels like the closest thing to home I've ever had.
Morning finds me waiting in my car for the pool to open, feeling years of training like DNA flowing through me. I see my mother's ghost in the car beside me, in her gray winter coat with faux raccoon fur, smelling of vodka and Estee Lauder, waiting as she did when I was too young to drive. What did she think about in those dark mornings? Who was she beyond mother and wife?
Kapitel 10
The Water Will Hold You
You didn't think I'd leave you inside marriage and family in the regular way, did you? I love my family gonzo-Andy and Miles rebirthed me. I'm married with family. And I love women. Sue me.
I don't have wisdom, just a wise-ass voice people tire of. Until I crashed into a pregnant woman and met the Mingo, I thought life was a me-drama. But swimming back through your past, you hit an endwall-mine is my mother and dead baby girl, written on my skin through rituals of pain and pleasure.
Here's the deal about family: you have to make it up. I know amazing single women with children who are families. Gay men and women with kids. Bisexuals and transsexuals who family up everywhere. People without partners creating families in everyone they touch. The heterosexual trinity is just one story.
If your marriage fails, make up a different you. If your birth family sucked, make a new one. If your current family hurts, leave now. Break into words like "relationship," "marriage," "family" and bring the walls down. Make up stories until you find one you can live with.
I learned this through writing-bringing dreams to the tips of words, kissing them, breathing body to body to resuscitate a self. Make up stories as if life depended on it.
Though my resurrection has been strange, I can say it in one sentence: my mother did not protect me. As a girl, I died. So when my child died in my womb, it felt like I'd killed a girl I meant to love. It's a big deal to make a sentence-the line between life and death.
It took ten years to emerge from my daughter's death. Forgive women like me-we throw our bodies at life to keep the girls we were and the daughters we lost safe. I know how angry, naive, self-destructive I sound weaving through these stories. But beautiful things appear in dark places.
The things that happen to us are true. The stories we tell are writing-a body away from us, with forms and contortions, resistances and lies, unending desires.
Listen, I can see you. If you're like me, you don't deserve most of what's happened. But you're not alone. There's another love-the love of art. I believe in art the way others believe in god. In art I've met an army-a tribe giving company, courage, and hope. This book is for you. It's water I made a path through. Come in. The water will hold you.
