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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.
"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)
"Brilliant, unflinching, and written with the same heady, literary sophistication as Yuknavitch's novels. Compounded by real moments of narrative vulnerability, this memoir is as much an act of dismembering as it is of remembering." —Library Journal (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
"Provocative and expansive... Joy, sorrow, rage, fear, guilt, lust, adoration — it's all there in equal parts. The book empowers us to consider: When we look back at our pasts, how comfortable are we with seeing who we really were and embracing that version of ourself, however flawed? Perhaps more important, how do we shed the parts of us we no longer find useful to become something new?" —The San Francisco Chronicle
"Reading the Waves dives deep into Yuknavitch's history with violence and trauma to deliver a resonate message of storytelling's power to reframe our memories and shape our future. Perfect for readers and writers alike, this memoir is a testament to our ability to learn and heal through the stories we choose to tell." —Chicago Review of Books
"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
"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
This information about Reading the Waves was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Lidia Yuknavitch is the National Bestselling author of the novels The Book of Joan and The Small Backs of Children, winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Award's Ken Kesey Award for Fiction as well as the Reader's Choice Award, the novel Dora: A Headcase, and a critical book on war and narrative, Allegories Of Violence (Routledge). Her widely acclaimed memoir The Chronology of Water was a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for creative nonfiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Award Reader's Choice. The Misfit's Manifesto, a book based on her recent TED Talk, was published by TED Books. Her new collection of fiction, Verge, is due out from Riverhead Books in Winter 2020.
She has also had writing appear in publications including Guernica Magazine, Ms., The Iowa Review, Zyzzyva,...
... Full Biography
Link to Lidia Yuknavitch's Website
Name Pronunciation
Lidia Yuknavitch: LID-ee-uh YOOK-nuh-vich
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