The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [100]
What a consumer audience needs the story to be.
If you write outside of those lines, you will more often than not be coached back into the center.
I think of the writers and painters and musicians who have inspired me to not kill myself and keep going. Most of them did drugs and alcohol. All of them, really.
I never say in this book what happened to the woman I hit head on with my car. I have deferred that information purposefully. Because I want you to stay with me - me drunk driving across eight lanes of freeway traffic at midnight in my car - stay with me inside my own pain and grief and vodka breath and pee and barf-stay with me as the gunpowder smell from the airbags fills the car.
Sometimes we’re just sad. And wrong-headed. And drunk. That’s all.
There are so many stories to tell about what we do to our bodies.
There is a history to the mythos about addiction in the country-we’ve always burned witches - but I think the potent turning point was probably the establishment and codification of A.A. in this country. And the subsequent nationalized embrace of the general principles of the A .M. A. and the A .P.A. and the bible of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - how each of these defines illness and cures. Not to mention religion’s role in the false narrative of redemption. Now a whole industrial complex exists to serve the addiction narrative, along with a handy pharmaceutical empire.
My mother was an alcoholic. But I never think of her that way. I think she was in pain most of her life. I think she was just trying to drown a sadness that wouldn’t lift. I think if I had been her I would have killed myself like she tried to. I wish I had come conscious sooner. Maybe we could have talked about it. What drinking is. What it isn’t.
The other thing I’d say is that if we didn’t have drugs and alcohol, we wouldn’t have art. I know that is not a popular thing to say but I believe it is true nonetheless. Our drug and alcohol excesses kill people. Yes. But they also are part of who we are as artists. Part of why cultural production exists. Whether we want to admit it or not.
You write about the night you mother attempted suicide and how it angered you so that you wrote, “When I came out of the bathroom I felt a little bit like a person who could kill her.” It seems as if your relationship with your mother was more complex and complicated because while she angered you she was also the parent who was there for you in ways your father was not such as taking you to and from swim practice and setting you free to accept the swim scholarship from Texas Tech in Lubbock. As your mother was dying you told her that you loved her. Did this love include forgiveness? Can you say a bit about when and how this forgiveness developed?
You know Marguerite Duras once said “in childhood and the lives that follow, the mother represents madness. Our mothers remain the craziest people we’ve ever met.”
My mother remains the craziest person I ever met. But I mean something quite complex when I say that, maybe even profound. Up until the death of my daughter I would say that I maintained an antagonistic stance with my mother. I fought with her-I chose to fight with her-to find my own edges. She let me. She fought back. I brought my rage and pain right up to the surface of her puffy with drink skin. She let me. Maybe she even drew it out of me. Though we never laid a hand on each other.
We raged by and through one another. Not the rage of the father or symbolic father. The rage of women let loose, uncontained, when no one but us was in the house. I remember how her blue eyes went to the color of steel. I remember admiring it.
How she let me down of course