But one day I was in the garage hunting for corner braces to build a frame for a painting and I saw it on the shelf looking all …well. So I called my sister and asked, uh, do you want to do something with mother’s ashes? My sister who had been estranged from my mother from the time she was 16.
Oddly, she said, I guess. So I drove my mother in a box up to Seattle. She sat in the passenger’s seat.
Sitting in my sister’s living room on her brown leather couch that smelled vaguely of cat piss, we stared at the motherbox between us.
She said, “You wanna open it?”
“Sure,” I said. Then I examined the edges more closely, and I jammed my fingernails into the joints, and saw that there wasn’t a clear way to do it. So I said, “Do you have a knife?”
My sister left the room, went into the kitchen, and came back with a butter knife. I stared at it in her hand. Then I took it and tried to pry my box of mother open.
No luck.
“You have a flathead screwdriver?” I said.
“I think so,” she said, and went off in the direction of her garage.
“And a hammer,” I yelled after her.
I put the box on the living room floor. My sister knelt next to me. “Hold the bottom of it,” I said.
“Don’t hit me with the hammer,” she said.
“Move your head,” I said.
I placed the flathead screwdriver at the line where the box edges joined, and then I whacked it with the hammer. The box shot across their hardwood floor. “Look at it go!” Came out of my mouth before I could stop it. Then we both nearly died laughing, rolling on the floor like kids.
I swear to god we tried everything to get that goddamn motherbox open. At one point I even dropped it from the roof of her deck hoping it would sort of break open, but no. I briefly considered running over it with the car. There was no way into the motherbox of ash.
After I left, my sister told me she buried it in her backyard, but I visited her a month later and saw it in the back of her mini-coop with all her life shit and dog hair and car crap. I never confronted her about the lie. But I never saw the box again after that, either. It could be in the ground in her backyard.
Or it could be someplace else.
I can still see my mother sitting in her car as I’d come out of swim practice as a kid. The heater running. Whatever else she was, she was there.
Morning. I’m sitting in my car waiting for them to unlock the doors of the swimming pool. They open, and I enter. I shed my clothes. The water is the color of my eyes. The chlorine smell is more familiar than anything I have ever known. When I dive in, all sound, all weight, all thought leaves. I am a body in water. Again.
Mother, rest. I am home.
Wisdom is a Motherfucker
YOU DIDN1T ACTUALLY THINK I WAS GOING TO LEAVE you inside marriage and family in the regular way, did you?
Listen, I love my family. Like gonzo. And it’s true enough Andy and Miles have pretty much rebirthed me. And yeah. I’m married. With family.
And I love women. Sue me.
But there are other wisdoms.
Unfortunately, I am not wise. I don’t have a special look back on your own life wise voice. More often than not, all I have is a wise-ass voice, and people get tired of that, I can tell you. Although I am fairly skilled at creating lyrical passages when needed.
Up until the place in my life where I crashed into a pregnant woman head-on and met the Mingo, I thought the whole story was about me. A me drama. All these things that have happened to the Lidia.
But what happens to you when you swim back through your own past is that you find an endwall. The endwall for me is my mother and my dead baby girl. I learned it at the surface of my skin where it is written now through rituals of pain and pleasure.
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 time in your life?
LY: You know Faulkner said, “Given the choice between grief and nothing, I choose grief.” The same quote has been attributed to him about pain.
I’m not sure it is possible to articulate grief through language. You can say, I was so sad I thought m
y bones would collapse. I thought I would die. But language always falls short of the body when it comes to the intensity of corporeal experience. The best we can do is bring language in relationship to corporeal experience-bring words close to the body-as close as possible. Close enough to shatter them. Or close enough to knock a body out. To bring language close to the intensity of experiences like love or death or grief or pain is to push on the affect of language. Its sounds and grunts and ecstatic noises. The ritual sense of language. Or the cry.
Poetic language - and by that I mean the language of image, sound, rhythm, color, sensation-is probably the closest we bring language to experience - poetic language takes you to the edge of sense and deep into sensation. So after I name my primal grief, the death of my daughter the day she was born, it felt precise to move directly to poetic language. The metaphor of collecting rocks is more “true” to me to the experience of grieving than to say, I was intolerably sad. It feels precise to draw that metaphor of collecting rocks out, to extend it as long as possible, to let the reader feel the space of grief in the house the way I did. It’s my hope that at least one person will find resonance in that extended language space.
I want you to hear how it feels to be me inside a sentence. Even if some of the sentences seem to lose their meaning. I want the rhythm, the image, the cry to remain with your body. You could probably go through this book and literally chart the moments of emotional intensity by watching where the language - to quote Dickinson-goes strange.
You have published both fiction and nonfiction. Can you talk about your experience with both genres as well as the role memory plays?
While I was writing this book, many things occurred to me about both memory and about the relationship between fiction and non-fiction.
About memory, after my father drowned and lost his wits - specifically his short-term and a good bit of his long-term memory, I became rather obsessively interested in how memory works at the level of neuroscience and biochemistry. I was trying to deal with the fact that the things he’d done had been “erased” from experience. Part of me didn’t believe it-I’d look at him and think, is the dark side of him still in there? Tucked deeply behind the gray matter?
Turns out, according to neuroscience, the more you actively “remember” something, the more the headstory you carry around changes. Every time you recall something, you modify it a little bit and that’s because brains-this is very cool - brains work through a mixture of images, pictures, feelings, words, facts, and fiction-all “recollected.” Eventually you are not remembering what happened at all, but your story or head movie about it. The safest memories are probably those embedded in the brains of people who have lost the ability to retrieve them.
In writing, every narrative and linguistic choice you make forecloses others, directs the story a certain way, focuses on a particular image, extends a metaphor that on another day, you might have chosen very differently. Form has everything to do with content in this sense. So what is “true” in non-fiction writing is also always “crafted” - given shape and composition and emotional intensity-through our narrative choices as writers. And that’s in addition to the science of memory. So the true story is always a fiction. This is why I have come to believe that non-fiction and fiction are as inextricably linked as memory and imagination - which, as it turns out, also use the same brain circuits when they are active.
So much of memory is recollecting pieces. And that’s what writing is - drawing from language to recollect and shape pieces of things. I am absolutely more able to reveal emotional truths about myself or anything inside fiction writing. The imaginative realm makes the most “sense” to me in my life - it’s everything else in life that is difficult. But I did find something in the course of writing this non-fiction book that truly amazed me. I could address my mother and father as characters from parts of their lives that did not include me. I could imagine a prestory to them. I could feel compassion for them. And I can thank them for this life I have, as bittersweet a process as that is to move through.
Earlier you mentioned the metaphor of collecting rocks. One of my favorite chapters, “Metaphor,” describes this as follows: “The rocks. They carry the chronology of water. All things simultaneously living and dead in your hands.” Here also is your title. What does the chronology of water mean to you?
Yes, this title came to me long ago-when I was 26! Wait, was I ever 26? Man that seems like epochs ago. I was in a creative writing workshop with the wonderful Diana Abu-Jaber. My daughter had just died, and I was a mess-raging, grieving, self-destructing. But I did manage to make it into that creative writing classroom. I wrote a crazy short story made from seemingly random fragments. Diana looked at the rush of fragments and said Lidia, they all have something in common. Because I was a knownothing, I said, what? Water, she said. She also said, I think this is a book. I think it’s the story of your life, maybe.
But at that time I was busy. Busy raging, grieving, fucking up.
Later I pulled the story back out and looked at it. You know what? She was right. And I thought, if this is the story of my life, no wonder it’s in fragments. It’s got a messed up chronology because that’s how I feel about life-it’s not linear. It moves in fits and starts, doubles back, repeats or extends an image. I thought if my life has a chronology, it’s the chronology of water - the way water carved the earth, the way water carries us into the world, the way we are made of water, the way water retreats or comes. I had, in other words, with her help, found my central metaphor.
That story was eventually published in The Northwest Review, and as you know, all these years later, has become the spine and bones of this book.
In my house there are many rocks. What I love about rocks that you find in rivers or at the ocean’s shore is that they are the sediment of all life on the planet continuously destroyed and remade. When you hold a rock in your hand you are holding everything in existence, even space dust, and it’s traveled oceans to get to you. So fragile and yet solid - made from pieces of things - like we are.
Writing restored your personal narrative that was not allowed in your father’s house while you were growing up. “My voice, she was coming. Something about my father’s house. Something about alone and water.” Does writing provide the same essential to Lidia the adult? Are the reasons you wrote then and now different?
Many people will know what I mean when I say that I can’t seem to live without the process of making art. I mean I literally fall apart or go to shit when I’m not making something, I can’t find the balance in my life or the center, I’m simply less of a person. Lost. Or worse. It feels like writing is the only thing I am any good at, but that probably isn’t entirely true. What I mean when I say that writing is the only thing I am good at is that it is the place where I feel most present, most worth a crap, most able to give something useful.
But there is another thing about writing that may or may not be something I should tell people-ha. I do know that when I’m inside writing I don’t want to be anywhere else. It’s like being inside a song or a painting. Wouldn’t it be something to be able to inhabit art? It’s a little frightening though - to think about staying there - not coming out. Perhaps that is a psychosis edge. I have a painter friend who talks this way about wanting to stay inside the painting - trusting images and color and composition more than people - I definitely feel that way too. We joke about not coming out sometimes.
There are reasons to come out. My son, my family. Love. Animals, the ocean.
Too, it strikes me that in America we don’t much have a “sacred” place or role for the isolate artist any longer. Everything has been sucked up into marketing and celebrity and the almighty commodity - so if you are a writer, you are meant to sell something. If it sells, it has worth. But in my heart of hearts I just want to sneak individual books into the pockets of sad people. Or stuff pews with them! Because writing gave me a place to go and be and grow when I wanted to give up. And I’d like to jam my foot
in the doorway so that others might find this place too. And yes, that is still true. Maybe more than ever.
Swimming offered you water, respite from home, your life there. During your senior year of high school at the State Championships your relay team scored the best time in the nation. “Then Jimmy Carter took all little girl dreams of swimmer glory away from our bodies with a boycott-Randy’s famous pool full of winners included- anyway. There was no world left to belong to. Not athlete, not daughter.” Later you accepted a scholarship in Texas and once there left both the college and competitive swimming. Did the U.S. boycott of the Olympics have anything to do with this or affect your future relationship with the sport?
My sister and I have always had a little bit of a hard time distinguishing reality from fiction. We both escaped our childhood terrors in books and music and art, and those creative worlds were more real to us than the one that trapped inside my father’s house.
Something could be “true” one minute, say, Christmas morning with presents and a tree, and rendered “untrue” within the first twenty minutes of opening presents if my father’s rage got loose. Or you could get an “A” at school, and bring it home only to be shamed: “What, does that make you special?”
Once my sister crawled underneath her high school art lab table and refused to come home. Ever. I’d go to school or to swim team-my two great escapes - and be unable to tell reality from nonreality. At the pool, in the safety of water, alongside the beautiful bodies of almost women, was that reality? At school where teachers gave me books to read that forever took me to other worlds, wasn’t that real? Or was reality back at home, where even breathing meant shame?
Reality lost its hold on me by the time I was 10.