Like many of Lidia Yuknavitch’s readers, I was once her student. I met Yuknavitch first through The Chronology of Water, a book that gave me permission to abandon literary structure in a way that made memoir feel closer to telling the truth. When I found out she’d be heading the nonfiction program at Eastern Oregon University, I applied and was accepted to join her in the first cohort of EOU’s MFA program. Yuknavitch’s classes, like her books, went beyond traditional craft. She offered us linguistics, semiotics, historical feminism, neuroscience, and a kaleidoscopic approach to what truth can mean. Under the premise that our memories are remade every time we remember them, our cohort sought to dissolve the pretense of transparency in creative nonfiction, troubling the music of language and scene.
Of course, I’m biased. I’m also a scientist myself, and I don’t believe objectivity is possible for people who write book reviews after entering the world of a book. Truth, especially in art, is subjective. The point isn’t trying to divorce oneself from that subjectivity—but to interrogate it, expose it, and let it be active on the page. (I learned that from Yuknavitch, too.)
The throughline in Yuknavitch’s books is something like gentle brutality—or brutal gentleness. In her books and in real life, Yuknavitch is warm and welcoming, but she doesn’t shy away from grit. In her new memoir, Reading the Waves, she begins by contending with the death of her ex-husband, and the thrum of this contention recedes and returns throughout the book, anchoring us to the ways we connect and disconnect with ourselves and others across space and time. In the beginning, she writes, “This is not a hero’s journey, or a traditional memoir, though travel and memory and storytelling are all in its pages.”
We are carried through chapters and pages through the lyric lean of language and theme. There are trees and mushrooms and mothers and hummingbirds and cemeteries. There’s masturbation and orgasm and broken bodies. There are ends that override or transform into beginnings. There’s the constant burning heart of chosen family. There are oceans, real and metaphorical. And the currents that connect them are not easy answers or predictable plotlines.
Like Yuknavitch’s novels, essays, TedTalk, and her teaching, Reading the Waves is both instructive and compelling, clarifying the process of embodied imagination by modeling how to use language and the body to interrogate memory itself. Reading it, we are reminded over and over that our stories of what happened and what it all meant are changed every time our memories are activated. Inside that remaking is an opportunity for us to reshape our own story. “We story our way through lives,” she writes. “Might those stories loosen, lift, change?”
This memoir lovingly but ferociously argues that the capacity for ordinary people to reimagine their identities and positionality in their own lives is inherently activist.
As she transforms story into a verb—as if it is an act we do both to ourselves and others—Yuknavitch grants us both a deep autonomy and a blooming awareness about how the way we perceive people interacts with who they actually are. Through stories of teen sex, parental abuse and loss, stillbirth, childbirth, raising children, traveling, loving, and reaching out and through the natural world, Yuknavitch both emphasizes the true end of things—and troubles it. She writes, “Being, like imagination, is trans. It moves. Across. Beyond. Through. Change. Shapeshifting. Interbeing. Interspecies.”
There’s an uncomfortable chasm between these two truths in our lives and in this memoir: we know that everything in is temporary, that loss is inevitable and final. And—we know that grief is not a static process, that it will slap and slam us again and again throughout our lives. Yuknavitch doesn’t avoid this discomfort. She writes directly toward it arguing, in my read, that this chasm is the actual space where we all actually live, “To experience joy, it seems that you have to be open to all the other possibilities. Being that open hurts.”
We enter the memoir knowing that story is a made thing, and we’re invited to believe that the stories we make of our own lives aren’t fixed. We’re invited into Yuknavitch’s stories not to gallop through a slow rise from climax to satisfying conclusion. We’re invited in to watch the making and remaking. We are invited to make and remake, too.
Reading the Waves, by Lidia Yuknavitch. New York, New York: Riverhead Books, February 2025. 224 pages. $29.00, hardcover.
Asha Dore is a journalist and illustrator with recent bylines in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Business Insider. Find her at ashadore.net or on Instagram @adjsbb.
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