Reading the Waves: A Memoir

by Lidia Yuknavitch

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 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.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, LGBT, Queer, Biography Memoir, Biography, Autobiography

224 pages, Hardcover

First published February 4, 2025

About the author

Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of the National Bestselling 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, and the novel Dora: A Headcase, 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. Her nonfiction book based on her TED Talk, The Misfit's Manifesto, is forthcoming from TED Books.

She founded the workshop series Corporeal Writing in Portland Oregon, where she teaches both in person and online. She received her doctorate in Literature from the University of Oregon. She lives in Oregon with her husband Andy Mingo and their renaissance man son, Miles. She is a very good swimmer.

Reviews

[Andy Pronti · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m not sure how much more I can praise Lidia Yuknavitch. This was excellent. It felt like we picked right up where The Chronology of Water left off and continued to learn and grow. I will follow Lidia Yuknavitch to the ends of the earth, ends of a self, a new beginning, a new story.

[Theresa Kennedy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was so lovely to read, so honest, so heartrendingly truthful, you can feel it, that I found myself reading passages more then twice, sometimes even three times, just to absorb them and think about them. And so much of what Lidia shares with the reader, you will remember from "The Chronology of Water," her first big memoir, about her troubled youth and all the pain and loss she survived. Both books go hand in hand. You can't read The Chronology of Water, without reading Reading the Waves. They are each a companion book to the other.

Lidia Yuknavitch is a serial survivor and there is such a wonderful feeling of perseverance, strength and tenacity in the stories she shares. There were so many parts of this book that were unforgettable. I particularly loved the last four pages or so, called SOLACES. The passages are like little pearls of wisdom and encouragement, for each person who reads the book.

I loved learning more about her former love, Devin, and how his death, a likely suicide impacted her for decades to come. It resonated so much with me, as I lost my first love, a man named Cam, when he hanged himself in 2018, and my heart was shattered. This book is for everyone but its audience, I believe, is mostly women, because so much of what Lidia has survived, other women have survived, too. We can relate to so much of what she shares in this book. Honestly, to really understand how wonderful this book is, you have to read it. I could offer some spoilers, but I'm not going to. Learn about it on your own. Her poetic, lovely and elegant writing is simply a language FEAST.

Highly recommended!

[emily]

‘These pages show you how I read my own embodied past, how I imagine a map for myself that loosens the grip that sorrow has on my soul without erasing my experiences, and how the map moves. I understand I cannot make a map for you—you have to retrieve the important particles from your own life that will help you story, destroy, and restore your life, and create your own map. At the interstices of our lives, we trade stories and secrets, we take turns helping each other go on. May these shared moments and rituals for release and revivification raise your own sweet solaces.’

(UPDATE) After allowing my thoughts to simmer through over the weekend, I now feel quite differently about it (than my (below) first impressions at least) — I think The Chronology of Water holds/reads better (for me). Browsed my old copy and was more drawn towards the notes/highlights I made in that one. As other readers have written and/or nuanced, this one feels like a sequel to TCoW, which in some ways is surely true, inevitably, considering it's a memoir. Both explore life/death and love/grief at its core, but this one leans more towards the writer’s sentiments in relation to an ex-lover (who seem to have taken ‘matters’ into his own hands), and the previous one goes deeper into the grief of ‘losing’ a daughter (in which nothing could’ve been done to ‘prevent’).

‘Smell kelp and taste salt; feel that underwater animals have brushed near you. Remember parts of your body are scattered in water all over the earth. Know land is made from you—Have endless patterns and repetitions accompanying your thoughtlessness, as if to say let go of that other more linear story, with its beginning, middle, and end, with its transcendent end, let go, we are the poem, we have come miles of life, we have survived this far to tell you, go on, go on. You will see you have an underlying tone and plot to your life underneath the one you’ve been told. Circular and image bound. Something near tragic, near unbearable, but contained by your irreducible imagination—who would have thought of it but you— your ability to metamorphose like organic material in contact with changing elements. The rocks. They carry the chronology of water. All things simultaneously living and dead in your hands.’ (from TCoW)

Another difference (between the earlier text and the latest one) being the structure of the texts — the previous one felt less edited/meddled with somehow (though I wouldn't know if that was truly the case, it just ‘feels’ like so — it just has a certain ‘rawness’ to it that feels like it was deliberately left that way without any obligation/need for it to be ‘made-presentable’). This one feels ‘cleaner’, with a slight stifling feeling that feels like stoicism or rather forced-stoicism (but compensates with an endearing tenderness of someone who has ‘lived more’ (for the lack of a better phrase)). But regardless, I thought the writers referenced/quoted in this one were very fab choices (Clarice Lispector, Virginia Woolf, Getrude Stein, Jeanette Winterson (to name a few)) . And with everything ‘said’, I’d still recommend anyone to read both anyway — both rather than one for a fuller experience. If anything it’s interesting to ‘see’ what ‘changed’ and what remains ‘constant’ in the writer’s life.

—

(FIRST IMPRESSIONS) This, I like far more than Yuknavitch's other one, The Chronology of Water, but it still felt a little repetitive towards the end (subjective feeling, etc.), and the same kinds of 'water' analogies/metaphors also felt over-used somehow. In any case, well-written overall, and I probably won't 'rate' it because it's a personal memoir, but if counts for anything (probably doesn't but) I read it all from cover to cover quite quickly - not quite the one for me, but still very pleased to have read it. The first third/half is very 'engaging' (for the lack of a better word), but the second half kind of mirrors it - and it felt a bit like reading the same thing over and over again (not sure if this was the intended 'stylistic' choice? Did the writer do it for the 'vibes' sort of thing?).

‘Narrative is a shapeshifting space — carries with it the possibility of arrangement, de-arrangement, and rearrangement, as does language itself. If I step back into a story I have been carrying in my body about my experiences, it is possible to change the point of view, it is possible to curate the elements of the story differently, bring different themes or images forward or let them recede — I’m talking about what we do with events in our lives. We story them and try to learn to live with them. Anything that can be put to story can be storied differently. Ask any member of a family about a holiday dinner and you will get a different story. One of the greatest transmographical spaces we experience in life happens at the level of memory. Memories are conjurings.

At the same time, memory is a mind-fuck. It doesn’t give a shit what you think about it. Memory slingshots you back and sideways. It interrupts time whether you like it or not, usually through your body. A sound, a smell, an image, and your body becomes a quivering wobble.’

[Danika at The Lesbrary · Rating 4 out of 5]

The relationship between memory and story is something that’s always fascinated me; I have a terrible memory and also experience the world first through story. So, I was hooked from the beginning, which describes how memory is iterative and remembering is an act of storytelling—”Anything that can be put to story can be storied differently.” She pulls in threads from many other writers, including Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison, to describe how this book is a way of laying down memories that are too heavy to carry forward.

These are heavy stories. I want to give content warnings for suicide, the death of a child, child sexual assault, rape, murder, ableism, homophobia, parental abuse, and domestic violence. These are not mentioned in passing: the majority of the book is dealing with these topics, and I will be discussing them more in this review.

While the subject matter is dark, the beautiful writing kept me entirely engrossed. There are also fairy tale-like interludes that feel part fantasy, part memoir, part poetry. This is a story about running toward self-destruction, but it’s made easier to handle knowing that it’s written from a very different time in her life.

Full review at the Lesbrary.

[Kate Woodward · Rating 5 out of 5]

I held this book tightly after I finished. Beauty; simply beauty. 🩵🪶🐬

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I believe that memory inside the brain and memory as we experience it as a storytelling field carries within it tiny interstices or flash points where more than one meaning is available. In some ways I have come to think of memory as oceanic or like space. The way it stretches out or contracts. We enter into that fluid, vast space and locate moments that we use to create narratives that sustain us. We carry our memory pieces in our actual bodies. I often wonder what memory pieces we may be carrying from before we were born.

[Miriam Hall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powerful. Healing and healed. Yuknavitch’s first memoir ripped its way through my writing community - it was potent and also triggering as hell. This one has a lot of the same vivid intensity but it’s - grounded. You can tell she’s done a lot of processing and work.

[Kailyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5. I love Lidia Yuknavitch's insights. They're a privilege to read.

[Dana · Rating 5 out of 5]

i think lidia lives inside my brain. hey girl!

[Cynthia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the author's memoir and would like to get the book so I can read it rather than listen to it as I did. Her writing can be very poetic and intentionally repetitive--or, as she reminds us that Gertrude Stein said, there's no such things as repetition, but insistence. Insist she does--on her reader/listener knowing that one of her mother's legs was 6" shorter than the other, or that her former husband committed suicide, or that she is a strong swimmer. These sound like a cross between mundanity and Flannery O'Connor, and there is something of the both in this memoir, and yet it is compelling. Her writing bears reading, however, and I will update this after I have a chance to read rather than listening while driving which distracts too much from the attention to the lines that I want to insist on knowing better.

[lola]

Good book. Finished save single page in “sub” chapter which prompted me to say out loud to an empty room “she still has the rock? WHAT? ITS A REAL ROCK?" didn’t finish that page but rest of book, finished

[Charlotte · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible. Nobody inspires me to write more than Lidia Yuknavitch. I dog-eared so many pages in this book because there are questions, insights, and humor I'll flip back to again and again. This is now my second favorite memoir behind The Chronology of Water😊💙💦

[Kip Gire · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an amazing and powerful memoir... I felt profoundly touched multiple times through the single sitting I read this in.... this is a beautiful book that I will reread and continually pull from... just brilliant.

[lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved absolutely everything about this book.

[Emery Pearson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I slogged through this, unfortunately, because I adore The Chronology of Water. The writing is beautiful, of course, but I found myself putting the book down and not picking it up for a week or more. Maybe it’s me; maybe I’ll try again someday. But for now I’m just glad to move on.

[Alyson · Rating 5 out of 5]

1st read:
I don't write here to review and I certainly have issues with the oligarch who owns this platform. I rarely read what others post. Yet. I have started a tradition of writing favorite quotes from things I read. I am still trying to migrate this practice to a domain of my own. Yet I also know that this space helps writers. I have been off social media for 90 days now. I don't know how to engage with the world beyond work anymore via the Internet. Books, as ever, save me.

Some thoughts:
I love this book.
I adore this writer.
I pulled her book off the shelf years ago because it's so rare to see a Lithuanian name.
I'm rereading it. I turned the first page after I finished the last.
I started with the eBook from the public library and I decided to buy the book so that the 9 people waiting in line can get it faster.
I hope that money supports her writer program.
I lost all of my highlighted quotes so I am reading it.
I purchased it from an independent bookstore after a painting class. I feel like she would approve.
I've ordered books by Ginny and M Duras I have not read.
She may have pulled me back to writing...a wave that has receded and a tide that has not returned for me. Maybe.

Thank you, dear Lidia.

2nd read:
I started this again as soon as I finished it and I read a chapter a day. I see the waves now are not just water but colors. Each chapter has a color or several connected to the theme. Damn, I love her writing.

"Loving a drinker is like loving a river always leaving you for the ocean."

"You may have to lay some bodies down; you do not need to carry every body forever."

[Judy Frabotta · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yuknavitch has a beautiful lyric voice. But somehow I was impatient for the book to end. It was fascinating in parts, grandiose at times, and somehow both incomplete and overwritten. But I'm not sorry I read it. It felt sometimes like there was a woman bleeding in my kitchen.

[Hunter Marcus · Rating 5 out of 5]

She’s done it again—I love Lidia Yuknavitch so much. This book came through my life at the perfect time, and her discussion of the synthesis of fact and fiction really opened something for me. I love her brain.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very intimate and inspiring book.

[Donna Moriarty · Rating 3 out of 5]

Too much self exposure and precious prose and name dropping. Sure, she's talented. Just not for me.

[Sam Cheng · Rating 5 out of 5]

Conventional and non-conventional memoir fans, Lidia Yuknavitch.

Yuknavitch underscores how Reading the Waves isn’t a traditional memoir; rather, she reads (reveals to readers) and liberates fictitious stories lodged in her body. This literary release is a shape-shifting, narrative transmographic space. To be 100 with you, I’m not entirely sure what “narrative transmography” means for Yukavitch, but she wants to permit one’s mapping of experiences to move without erasing experiences. It sorta functions this way: Yukavitch returns to certain objective stand-out events in her life; in the act of inhabiting the stories in her mind, they shape her such that the memories’ subjective and fluid meanings evolve. The preface lays out Yuknavitch’s philosophy and methodology of writing about remembering. Is it a genre convention to lay out one’s approach to memoir-ing in the preface? Either Chihanya or Mlotek (or both) writes theirs out too in Bibliophobia and No Fault, respectively (I forget). I mention this because I finished their memoirs recently, and I think the throat-clearing is fine but unnecessary.

Whether or not I accurately grasped Yuknavitch’s modus operandi in theory, I really enjoyed Reading the Waves and it worked for me. Laden with groundedness, she shows readers why the experiences included in this compilation meaningfully shape her. Nothing feels disjointed (save for the last chapter, Solaces), which I thought might be the case, given her introductory remarks on the book’s genre. The writing is textured—she’s careful, abrasive, love-lorn, tender. The English language is Kinetic Sand in Yukavitch’s dexterous hands. I love it when authors unpretentiously remind me that verbs can be nominalized and nouns verbalized.

I also love when memoirs help me embody someone else’s narrative, take me deep into their mind’s nexus, show me how to sympathize with the author, and leave me feeling hopeful. Yuknavitch endures in spite of wading through intersections of death, and wonderfully, she normalizes sorrow, guiding readers to shed the bodies too. Moreover, even though loss dismantles, Yuknavitch pushes you to dive towards transformation because what’s ugly can be reshaped and emerge into something better, whether for us or those who come after. Yuknavitch seems to credit her mother, at least in part, who embodied grace in the face of violence and navigated life “with one leg six inches short than the other” (150). One of my favorite chapters is Monster because she honors her mom well.

[Kaylie]

Ran out of books on a trip and picked this up at an indie Denver bookstore I was happy to support, Petals & Pages. I wish I'd chosen anything else! This book was deeply not for me, despite being about many topics I usually connect with. The same thing happened for me years ago when I tried reading Yuknavitch's celebrated novel, The Book of Joan. Although much lauded, Yuknavitch's writing is just not for me. Unrated because obviously this is a much-loved book and writer; in another situation I'd have put it down after 10 pages or so, and we'd have drifted apart, this book and I, mutually blameless. But I had run out of books and this was what was on the plane with me, so we persisted. I did not enjoy it. The problem here clearly lies with me.

[Jake Procino · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really should have DNF’d this book. The memoir is ok in the beginning when she’s talking about Devin, but it really takes a nose dive during the chapters “Escape Artist” — where she incessantly complains about hippies — and “Molecule” — where she laments loving a straight woman who doesn’t love her back.

At the end of the book she writes: “I’ve carried the shapeshifting story of Devin for thirty years…More and more I see that there was no hero, no villain, no plot, no climax, no resolution,” and that’s more or less the problem with this memoir. It’s a bowl of soup. It’s a jumbled mess with pointless non-sequiturs and and stories that lead nowhere and an unbelievable amount of groaners (lines that make you roll your eyes).

Just because you’re a writer and bad things happened to you, doesn’t mean you should write a memoir. Consider reading “In The Dream House” instead.

Some of the worst lines in this book include:
- “The more he drank, the more empty he became”
- “Shapeshifter. Warrior. Artist.”
- “…in spite of the whole world making us feel not good enough…The world was wrong”
- “The life force emerging in me wrecked the plot of us”
- “I was not a lesbian, either. Or I was a failed lesbian…The word that comes closest is probably “water””

[Fabienne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve been craving a book that really hits — and this was it. I cannot praise Lidia Yuknavitch’s writing enough. You might wonder how it’s possible for someone to write a second memoir without it becoming repetitive, but apparently, it is. She has a unique way of narrating pain in a raw, blunt, and visceral way, while still maintaining a kind of meta-level without it being too abstract.
I particularly loved her descriptions of gender, sexuality and desire.
I cried a little bit at the end of the hiking chapter.
If you want a non conventional memoir that deals with processing trauma and pain this is for you!

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

Audiobook

[Jeremy Hanes · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am have never read such a beautiful and heartening memoir. Thank you Lidia for shedding your skin and letting us in. Such beautiful wisdom and outlook through heartache and pain.

[Audrey Dubois · Rating 5 out of 5]

AUDREY' S ONE-SENTENCE BOOK REVIEWS

when you self-mythologize, what genre does your story become?

[Estefani Duran · Rating 5 out of 5]

* 4.5 stars rounded up *

Memories come and then you have to let them go. A beautiful, moving read. Yuknavitch reminding me that letting go takes time and ”it’s not your fault”.

[Zella · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a kind of painful but beautiful read. The writing reminds me of my own writing in a way that I don’t think I’ve ever encountered before- the author is uncertain at times, and reading these essays feels like reading the process of someone, well, processing something, working through a feeling or an association or a complicated set of interconnected feelings. This book feels deep and rich and messy, very human. I loved it.

[Jill · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sort of a trauma dump, but an uplifting one? The point being: how do we craft a life where trauma doesn’t best us, where we can reclaim some story. The best acknowledgments, and I love that she talks about how much she loves color.