The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch

I thoroughly enjoyed reading the memoir The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch. It reminded me of how important swimming was to me when I was younger, how summers were spent swimming laps on the swim team. In the memoir, Lidia is an Olympic class swimmer and wins a college scholarship. She uses swimming to escape her problems at home due to an abusive and controlling father and a suicidal mother. She survives divorce, DUI, drug and alcohol problems, abuse, a miscarriage, and other problems. The chapters transition back and forth through time. Lidia describes she wanted to write with the fluidity of water, without a linear time frame, because water has no memory and flows back and forth and in all directions.

Lidia begins the book with her miscarraige and the emotional despair she suffers while trying to recover. Before going home at the hospital, the nurse brings her to a shower room and Lidia tries to wash away the pain. The nurse remarks 'I thought you had drowned in there.' Later, Lidia and her husband take the child's box of ashes to the ocean. The tide brings the box back to them. They throw in again, and again the box is taken back to them. They repeat again and again, and finally succeed.

Lidia then describes her relationship with her parents. Her father is abusive and controlling. Her mother abuses drugs and alcohol, and Lidia finds her after a suicide attempt. When Lidia wants to go to college in Texas with a swimming scholarship to escape her family in Florida, her mother signs the paperwork and helps her hide this from her dad, who does not approve and wants Lidia to stay near home where he can continue to abuse and control her.

In college, Lidia experiments with drugs and enjoys the party lifestyle of the small town in Texas. She soon jeopardizes her scholarship by neglecting her schoolwork and showing up to the swim team under the influence. She meets her first husband and while dating enjoys corrupting him. She convinces him to break into other people's homes with her. Eventually, she divorces him and begins a relationship with her second husband that also ends in divorce.

Lidia hits rock bottom when she is arrested for a DUI. She describes the humiliation of jail honestly and without editing the gritty details. She later completes community service and picks up trash along the highway. Eventually, writing becomes her salvation and helps to facilitate her recovery.

Lidia becomes infatuated with writing and attends a seminar with a friend in the graduate writing program. She then decides that she wants a career in writing. She meets Kathy Acker and falls in love with her at a book signing. She has a casual long distance relationship with Kathy. Lidia describes Kathy Acker's books as must reads, so I tried to read them after reading The Chronology of Water. I did not like Kathy's books, the experimental writing was OK, but several of the books followed the same story told different ways with a lot of delusional twists that did not captivate me.

She describes her relationship with Ken Kesey, who was a mentor and father figure to her. Ken Kesey is famous for writing the book One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Kesey led a group of students at the University of Oregon, including Lidia, in writing a book of collaborative fiction called Caverns. The book was not successful, but Lidia's description of how Kesey enlightened her is memorable and entertaining.

Lidia becomes a professor and teaches writing. She starts dating one of her students, and he eventually becomes the father of her child and third husband. They live in a home in the woods and both raise their child in a loving atmosphere. This is overall a happy and surprising ending to the novel. The book ends with a Q&A with the author, and includes answers to questions about Lidia's unique writing style and her choice of topics.