Reading the Waves - by Lidia Yuknavitch (Hardcover)

About the Book

"The frank and revealing memoir of a writer who draws from her own creativity to heal"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

Praise for Reading the Waves

"Remarkable ... [T]he author decides to approach her own past like a favorite book, hoping this approach might 'loosen' those memories' grip on her psyche today. The eclectic results won't just move those who already follow [Yuknavitch], but will inspire readers to revisit their own lives with as much care and creativity."--Bustle

"At turns emotional and darkly hilarious ... this memoir is rich ground and a magnificent narrative about memory, trauma, and healing. Fans of genre-bending or lyrical memoir will enjoy this multilayered meditation leveraging Yuknavitch's creativity, thoughtfulness, and sense of wonder." - Booklist, starred review

"A noted writer and teacher explores the uses of memoir to recast and heal the wounds of the past. . . [Reading the Waves is] full of the messy, moving, in-your-face inspiration and storytelling for which Yuknavitch is beloved." --Kirkus Reviews

"A master class on how to hold your body's stories with tenderness as well as how to let go, Reading the Waves is a sigh of compassion. This book bleeds empathy in the most vulnerable and profound of ways. It's gorgeous." --Stephanie Land, author of Maid and Class

"Reading the Waves is electrifying. In it, Lidia Yuknavitch interrogates memory, both as an act and a concept--remembering becomes a process of re-membering, of revivifying and reassembling a moment, a story, or a body. Yuknavitch invites us to dive deep into the waters of grief and imagination, love and violence, then guides us back up to the surface where we breathe a little freer and can see both the possibilities of the past and future horizons anew. Yuknavitch is a literary renegade, exploding the borders of genre and radically reimagining the stories we carry as acts of resistance." --Suleika Jaouad, author of Between Two Kingdoms

"What makes us return to Yuknavitch again and again is her searing honesty, wide-open compassion, and sensual engagement with this earthly realm. Reading the Waves is brilliant storytelling by one of our most adventurous creatives. It is an investigation into how our stories must shift to accommodate each age, each generation, even as they remain mythically rooted in the ancient archetypal shapes of human transformation. This is a book you will return to again and again for the wild astuteness of its wisdom."--Joy Harjo, 23rd U.S. Poet Laureate

"Yuknavitch is a lighthouse, strobing her insistent truth across any distance. I have learned so much from her about storytelling, survival, and the ways that tenderness and strength are siblings. I'll read anything she writes."--Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood

About the Author

Lidia Yuknavitch is the nationally bestselling author of the novels Thrust, The Book of Joan, The Small Backs of Chil­dren, and Dora: A Headcase, and of the memoir The Chronology of Water. She is the recipient of two Oregon Book Awards and has been a finalist for the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize and the PEN Center USA Award for creative nonfic­tion. She lives in Oregon.