The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [96]
So here’s the deal. About family, you have to make it up. Seriously. I know amazing single women and their children who are families. Gay men and women with kids who are families. Bisexuals and transsexuals who family up all over the place. People who don’t have partners create families in everyone they touch. I know women and men from a multitude of sexual orientations without any children just doing their lives who create families that kick the can down the street. The heterosexual trinity is just one of many stories.
If your marriage goes busto, make up a different you. If the family you came from sucked, make up a new one. Look at all the people there are to choose from. If the family you are in hurts, get on the bus. Like now.
I’m saying I think you have to break into the words “relationship” or “marriage” or “family” and bring the walls down. Don1t even get me started on the current BAR PEOPLE WHO LOVE EACH OTHER FROM MARRYING fiasco. Annie get your gun. Jeez. Anyway. The key is, make up shit.
Make up stories until you find one you can live with.
I learned it through writing.
Writing can be that.
Writing to bring the delicate dream to the tips of words, to kiss them, to rest your cheek on them, to open your mouth and breathe body to body to resuscitate a self.
Make up stories until you find one you can live with.
Make up stories as if life depended on it.
Though I admit my resurrection and transformation have been a little strange, I can say it in a sentence now: my mother did not protect me. As a girl, I died.
So when my child died in the womb of me, it was as if I’d done the same thing. I’d killed a girl I meant to love.
It’s a big deal to make a sentence.
The line between life and death.
It took me 10 years to emerge from the grief of a dead daughter. You have to forgive women like me. We don’t know any other way to do live than to throw our bodies at it. I was the kind of woman whose relationships were grenades and whose life became a series of car wrecks-anything to keep the girl I was and the girl I had -tiny daughter dolls - safe from this world.
So yes I know how angry, or naïve, or self destructive, or messed up, or even deluded I sound weaving my way through these life stories at times. But beautiful things. Graceful things. Hopeful things can sometimes appear in dark places. Besides, I1m trying to tell you the “truth” of a woman like me.
The things that happen to us are true.
The stories we tell about it are writing. A body away from us. Writing-with its forms and contortions, its resistances and lies, its unending desires, its on and on.
Listen I can see you. If you are like me. You do not deserve most of what has happened or will. But there is something I can offer you. Whoever you are. Out there. As lonely as it gets, you are not alone. There is another kind of love.
It’s the love of art. Because I believe in art the way other people believe in god.
In art I’ve met an army of people - a tribe that gives good company and courage and hope. In books and painting and music and film. This book? It’s for you. It’s water I made a path through. I’m not speaking out of my asshole when I say this.
Come in. The water will hold you.
Interview with Lidia Yuknavitch
RHONDA HUGHES, PUBLISHER AND EDITOR FOR HAWTHORNE Books, conducted this interview with Lidia Yuknavitch.
RH: Your memoir opens with the loss of your daughter and your grief process. It is some of the most beautiful writing in the book, poetic, rich imagery, lines that demand the reader speak them aloud. Your ability to transform profound grief into art, into literature, speaks to me. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to publish your work. You write, “Language is a metaphor for experience. It’s as arbitrary as the mass of chaotic images we call memory, but we can put it into lines to narrativize over fear.” Can you talk a little bit about your experience recreating with words this