Like many others, I first encountered Lidia Yuknavitch’s work when a friend thrust her pages into my hands. I didn’t consider myself a writer at the time, or even a reader. As a kid, I had devoured books, searching for a story that would show me a path out of the small, thirsty town where I grew up. By the time I was eighteen, five people in my family had died in quick succession, and a hurricane wrecked my hometown, chasing me out of the Gulf South. I returned two years later when the blue collar peace I’d established in a big Southern city was punctuated by having a stillborn baby. Other people’s stories made me feel isolated: the easy hero plots, the way a single life crisis would resolve with romance or magical fanfare. There was no resemblance to my life in the literature I knew to look for.
Back in my home state, I chose creative writing as a major at a new university because it offered the fastest track to a degree after years of working through community college. I was 21, standing in the wet heat after a storm, gripping an essay called “The Chronology of Water,” published in the late 1990s, the paper still warm from the library copy machine. A fellow student had handed it to me before walking into class. “Lidia was my teacher. She’s amazing. Read this. Keep writing,” he said. The story was a wrecking ball through whatever hell all that loss had built around my heart, and there I was, suddenly wide open. I’d learned too young that whatever we think we can control in our lives can be detonated by unexpected tragedy at any moment, and since learning it, I’d felt terrorized by the knowledge and raw and totally alone inside of it.
I felt safe for the first time in years after reading a handful of pages. There was at least one other human who had been blown apart too. It was a lifeline.
“We’re allowed to write like this?” I said to my classmate.
“No,” he said. “But we will anyway.”
About five years later, that classmate, the writer Shane Hinton, who would become a dear and lifelong friend, sent me an email to tell me that Lidia’s essay had been published as a memoir, also titled The Chronology of Water. This month, a film adaptation directed by Kristen Stewart and starring Imogen Poots hits theaters nationwide. The book cracked open a world of storytelling for countless students, readers, and writers ,like me. I wonder if the film will set a similar blaze. The audience is here, ready. It always has been.
When it was published in 2011 by an independent press, The Chronology of Water (affectionately called COW) was advertised as an “anti memoir,” and over the next ten years, it amassed an enormous following among readers and writers alike. The story is compelling, but the scenes contain a simple act of unavoidable revolution: they show the lived experience of a girl/woman with a body.
It sounds obvious: we experience the events in our lives with our bodies. But in the old school literary canon (and a boatload of modern lit), the visceral and corporeal are often left out. A life story is told from a birth to midlife or later, a chronology built of time. The scenes in COW are gorgeous, but they aren’t always pretty. There’s blood and rage, anguish, tenderness, sex and fierce, howling joy. COW is not a linear narrative. It is organized, as the title states, by water—both actual and metaphorical. There are scenes in swimming pools and along shorelines and bathtubs.
There is also the fluidity of language, fragments and run-on sentences organized to generate rhythm. One chapter toward the end of the book tells the story of a relationship in a series over very long sentences that end in a hammer of two brief, brutal questions. Another chapter is broken by white space. Another is broken by a refrain that starts with Before my father…, and every time the refrain appears, the end of the sentence changes. “Before my father’s hands moved against us he was an architect; lover of art…Before he was a soldier, he was an artist…Before my father was my father he was a boy.”
Reading it feels like music. It has a sensation. “Some people say that words can’t ‘happen’ to you. I say they can,” Lidia writes.
The novelist Lance Olsen described this as a “Yuknavitchean” sentence, “If we’re to drop from shape into obsessions, [the sentence] thinks, not through thoughts first, but through the body.”
I believe there are even more out there, a sea of us, lying in wait for a new friend to shove works like The Chronology of Water into our hands.
The narrator on the page (and I’d argue the writer herself) offers the kind of vulnerability that has a kind of paradoxical effect: She offers the details of her life with such specificity that the reader feels seen and heard, themselves, even if their life is wildly different. The language is also often inviting, sometimes funny, like a real person telling you a real story from their real voice and body. Lyric paragraphs are punctuated by inviting casual sentences like, “For part of my Lubbock life I became a Zombie. Not a flesh eating one. Gross. I’m no cannibal.”
Of course, the narrator on the page is a curated thing. But it’s curated with such care and craft that it feels like you can truly connect with her. This is the power of the often dismissed, so called “confessional” writing. And the massive following The Chronology of Water has built showcases the (sexist) dustiness of the literary industry’s extremely slow crawl toward acknowledgement of writing like this—when it comes from a woman.
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My cousin, a therapist, told me she’s handed COW to several friends and “at least fifty clients working through childhood or relationship trauma, questions about sexuality, heartbreak, and grief grief grief grief.” She came to it herself after her mother, my aunt, died unexpectedly. After reading dozens of novels and self-help books about grief, the line that hooked her happened a few pages into the first chapter, when Lidia writes about the aftermath of her stillborn baby, “I never felt crazy, I just felt gone away.”
“Most popular books want us to believe that every problem in life can be solved with a quest or a rescue (or for women—a quest that ends with a rescue),” my cousin said. “Not this one. The Chronology of Water tells the truth.”
“Storyspace is a vast, unruly free-flowing field (like dream space or the space of the imagination),” Lidia told me. “Fracturing (or even leaving) plot allows for body stories that do not serve the social order to speak, thrive, become. When I ask my body if it has a point of view, when I ask my shoulder or hips what stories they carry, stories come out in fits and starts. The danger is that a story might not be understood. The promise is, if enough of us told stories in rearranged forms, radical reshapings of self, other, and community might emerge.”
And it has. Anne Gudger, author of the memoir The Fifth Chamber, and Lidia’s student for nearly 15 years said, “Lidia holds the door open. She says, ‘Everything is writing,’ which is a beautiful paradigm shift.” Anne described how Lidia’s classes position writing as an act of excavation of our “body stories.”
“I wish I knew how many writers are published who have roots back to Lidia,” Anne said. “It’s a big number.”
I believe there are even more out there, a sea of us, lying in wait for a new friend to shove works like The Chronology of Water into our hands. But zombie beliefs about the inferiority of “confessional writing” keep resurfacing—and dominating the media landscape while being untethered to the needs of the masses who will continue to open our wallets for stories we feel connected to. Not that wallets are the main point—unless you’re sitting in an office making a decision about what book or film deals to sign, which stories to pour across social media, bookstores, streaming services, our lives.
“I think an exciting part of the conversation around The Chronology of Water is how no one in New York wanted to touch it. They didn’t think the public they’re constantly underestimating would understand or embrace it, when in reality it was the book so many readers had been waiting for,” said Gina Frangello, who has worked closely with Lidia in multiple capacities, including publishing each other’s stories in lit mags they edited. “People look at Lidia’s career now, and I don’t think they understand the odds that book— and she—overcame. Lidia was an indie writer, and while she was profoundly respected in those circles, her success is a true testament to word of mouth and the passion readers have about certain axis-shifting work.”
To understand both the “axis” and the “shift,” it’s impossible to leave out the tired conversation about a so-called history of a so-called genre (heavily associated with so-called confessional writing), a “genre” that Lidia and thousands of other writers before and after have smashed, redefined, rejected, gulped, rewritten.
“Women’s writing” is a bullshit term, a phrase that holds a terrible magic: It describes 51% of the population any time they put words to the page. In defining the genre, the term attempts to qualify the writing itself, begging questions like, What are the parameters of “women’s” writing? And by necessity, What is a woman, anyway? Because whatever the word woman means to you influences the shape of how you read the writing that comes out of us. Confessional as fuck—or confessional be damned, the contents of our paragraphs don’t really matter. (But they should.) Either way, it’s a trap we can’t escape. After all, some of us are in fact women, writing. “Our foremothers were encouraged to write about and through their experiences as wives and mothers and daughters,” Lidia said. “There was a kind of safe lane for that, a lane often quickly accepted as sentimental entertainment or bourgeois realism. I think when Plath and Sexton and Audre Lorde and Lucile Clifton, Toni Morrison and Gloria Anzuldua (and legions of other women) came along there was a pretty big disruption—in voice, body, full agency, full-throated, fully embodied experiences. That rupture produced a path. Some of us stepped into it.”
It sounds obvious: we experience the events in our lives with our bodies. But in the old school literary canon (and a boatload of modern lit), the visceral and corporeal are often left out.
COW was Lidia’s fourth book, her first memoir, and the year it was published, Eat, Pray, Love had been out for half a decade. Tina Fey’s Bossypants and Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman were published the same year—along with loads of think pieces about how the memoir boom—capped by Elizabeth Gilbert’s success and the film adaptation of her book—had ended.
Back then, the market seemed committed to defining so called “Women’s writing” in self–limiting terms: domestic, confessional, not literary, not real.
The Chronology of Water roared up at all that.
When I asked COW’s publisher, Rhonda Hughes, how this book shaped “women’s writing,” she said, “[It is] the permission Lidia gives to reveal one’s trauma and its lasting effects — a truth at the center of our shared humanity. Its message, above all, is that art, love, and community can transform a life.”
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When I asked Lidia the same question, she gave me a long list of writers who came before and those who were published around the same time as COW, telling me, “I see it as part of a larger constellation.”
Because that’s what Lidia does. Rooting down and sharing out at the exact same time, scooping decades of beauty and legacy and plunging it forward, into this moment, for you, for us, a gift.
She said, “If you do this, be a ‘writer,’ find a way to do it that allows you to steal the keys and give them away to legions of others. Because we need all the voices we can find, not just the rarified, famous, pretty ones. I think we all go through several grief and death journeys in our lives. There’s no way around them. Everyone gets dosed. I think each of those journeys is also an opportunity to bring something of use to your community when (and if) you surface.”
Shane Hinton, who handed me the pages that rearranged my whole life, said, “Lidia taught me that the goal of making literature is to forge connections with other people. To be a good writer means to be of service to others. We can’t do this alone.”
This is how community has always built itself through story: together, around a fire or a dinner table, cross legged on a bed, whispering in each other’s ears. Of course we don’t need permission from the guys who sign the marketing checks. But what if we shoved this kind of work into their hands, and they didn’t look away, but learned to grip it alongside us?
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In the eight years of optioning leading up to its limited LA/NYC release, Kristen Stewart spoke nonstop about the slim numbers of women in film: both makers and stories that center them, and how many industry barriers she faced trying to make The Chronology of Water. It’s desperately ironic that Kristen Stewart’s adaptation of Lidia’s underground firestorm of a life story is emerging at a time when rage is blooming about the dearth of femme directors in the land of film, and the literary world can’t shut up (again) about why memoirs supposedly “don’t sell.” (Which means that publishers aren’t buying them from authors; not that the public wouldn’t buy them in droves, if they knew, as Lidia says, the “portals” to ourselves and each other that they contained). The audience for women’s stories like this one is strong, huge, and hungry. We aren’t going to stop telling them. We aren’t waiting for someone to unlock the cage. We shouldn’t need a hero to champion makers who throw their bodies into their work. I think this is where a“cult following” comes from, when the art is heavy with heart and truth—but missing out on the kind of mainstream backing that would propel it across bookstores and screens in the way it deserves.
As Lidia often says, “We are the rest of you.” The beauty of a fire underground is that heat rises. How many stories have you witnessed in the last decade that follow the wild and beautiful current that The Chronology of Water fortified, electrified, fed? I want to believe that the film will have the same impact on cinema. I want to believe in doors that open faster, sooner. I want to believe in art that explodes across the planet without being commodified. I want to believe that deep beauty can be widespread without losing touch with its own locus. We need to read each other, to reach each other, to take each other in, true and rough and real.
