The Creation of a Girl: Lidia Yuknavitch's Dora

I have been waiting for Lidia Yuknavitch’s novel Dora: A Headcase since reading her memoir The Chronology of Water last year. In the memoir, Yuknavitch traces her journey from an abusive childhood and a troubled young adulthood to a middle age of acceptance, but above all, she rewrites what it means to be a woman and a girl in a culture that seeks to keep us silent. She gives voice to the corporeal experience that we girls and women are taught to shroud in shame. She locates creation and destruction in the body. She writes of her scars without flinching. She tells the stories that break the façade of the girl.

In Dora: A Headcase, Yuknavitch creates a girl who takes back her story. The character of Dora is based on the teenage girl at the center of Sigmund Freud’s 1905 case study on hysteria. Freud treated Ida Bauer, who he named Dora in the case study, for aphonia, the loss of voice. Despite her telling him otherwise, he attributes Dora’s hysteria to her unresolved sexual feelings for Herr K., a friend of the family who made advances towards her when she was fourteen. He also traces her symptoms to her repressed desires for her father and his lover Frau K., Herr K.’s wife. In the case study, Freud writes Dora’s story for her. In the novel, Yuknavitch gives Dora her voice.

Yuknavitch’s Dora is a seventeen-year-old punk teen in contemporary Seattle. She is on the cusp of adulthood, but adults treat her as a dependent minor without her own agency. She has suffered from bouts of aphonia after her father’s friend, Mr. K., propositioned when she was fourteen; he backed off only when she drew a pocketknife to her neck and cut a smile into her skin. Much to her frustration, she has yet to have sex. She faints when she becomes physically intimate with another, including her friend Obsidian, a girl from the Coeur d’Alene reservation with whom she is in love. With her posse of queer and misfit friends, she stages art attacks around Seattle. The adults consider these teen behaviors acting out, and Dora’s father sends her to the best shrink he thinks his money can buy, an elderly man she calls Dr. Sig.

“It’s not therapy. It’s epic Greek drama. You gotta study up. You got to bring game,” Dora says of her sessions with Sig. She knows that as a man in a position of authority, Sig has the power to tell her story over hers. And she knows that Sig views her problems through the lens of unresolved sexual issues. So she makes up outlandish dreams that hinge on objects that Sig thinks of as symbols of sexual repression. She likens the cracks on his office ceiling to vaginas. When he asks if she masturbates, she replies, “Do you?” and insists that he has to tell his intimate secrets before she will tell hers. She always carries a Dora the Explorer purse with her, modified with pins and skeletons. Inside the purse, she hides a recorder and tapes it all.

“I consider it my duty to beat Sig’s story of me,” Dora says. She wants to make a mix-tape of her sessions with Sig and snippets of punk music and play it at a rave. That is to say, she wants to recite Sig’s words in her own art. She wants to tell her story in her own voice. She knows that Sig is writing case studies of his patients. But she discovers that his publicist wants to turn the case studies, and in particular her story, into television for the money. Her pathologies would be broadcast on television for mass entertainment. Against her will, she would be portrayed as a “teen little monster girl,” a rebel bad girl who would serve as a catharsis and a warning for parents who believe in their right to absolute control over their children.

In her anger, she plots revenge. She makes a film instead. With the help of her posse, she sets up Sig and captures a horrifying, embarrassing, and absurd sequence involving his dick. She splices these scenes with images of the homeless, cuckoo clocks, nuclear explosions, humping buffaloes. “It’s a movie about everything. This world we live in. The bodies we’re stuck with. The lives we get whether we want them or not. How hard you have to work just to get through a fucking day without killing yourself.” To combat the invisibility of girls and women in the culture, she adds images of female artists who blew up the conventions of their media and made their own art. She considers the consequences of her actions, but she also says, “But you know what I think about more? I think about all the times in my life I didn’t understand what the fuck was happening and no one bothered to explain it to me.”

The plot of Dora: A Headcase is over the top. The pace is manic. It teeters between absurd comedy and the thrill of a chase. I often laughed out loud. Comedy in Dora is not just about entertainment; Yuknavitch uses farce to expose the hypocrisies of our institutions, in particular that of the family and its control over girls’ lives. Dora’s father suffers a heart attack. Her mother disappears to Vienna. At the same time, a raw cut of her film goes viral. Sleazy men stalk Dora and offer her money for her footage and when she refuses, their tactics become more violent. Amid all these traumas, Dora literally loses her voice. Her voice comes back to her as she defends the integrity of her art and her friendships. From the wreckage of her hijinks, Dora recreates herself. From the wreckage of her language, Yuknavitch creates a girl who demands, “I just want my stories to be mine.”

Chapter 19: The Less Than Merry Pranksters

I suppose you could call me an Oregon Writer. I live a good five minutes from the U of O campus, although I never studied at U of O. There is a bronze statue of Ken Kesey reading to children in downtown Eugene, where I live, where this particular chapter of The Chronology of Water takes place.

The chapter revolves around author Lidia Yuknavitch participating in a graduate writing workshop in which 13 people -- twelve "last ditch disciples and me" -- worked on a collective novel with the writer superstar Ken Kesey (pg. 113).

I chose to write on this chapter because I was going to write about being a writer here, and Ken Kesey, and yadda yadda yadda, but what I want to write about now is followers at the heels of greatness, and what we learn, how we as damaged specimens of the human race flock to these larger-than-life personalities to come to understand something, only to find ourselves nursing an aching and overflowing heart, namely this great person's often aching and overflowing alcoholic heart. This seems a common story, the acolyte helping the drunken prophet home so he can barf into his bed. That, and I also wanted to write about miracles and "reverse miracles,” a phrase Ms. Yuknavitch coins in this chapter to describe a young man collapsing after his first toke of the joint christened the collaborative effort of the group. A beautiful little phrase that will remain with me.

This moment is where the chapter takes off from its tentative beginning in the apartment of her friend, Meredith, for now we have become initiated into the less than merry pranksters ourselves. It quickly transforms into a litany of excess: “Some of us were high on pot and some of us dropped acid and some of us ate mushrooms” (pg. 119). There is something wonderfully mundane about all of this, especially when she repeats it later, a sort of cheeky acknowledgment of how boring psychedelia can really be sometimes, but there is also some of that very real rubbernecker joy of those of us who have grown up on the myth of the sixties, reliving it, and somehow reliving it through another sister rubbernecker who makes it all the more appetizing.

The excess described in this chapter is the excess of an ending, of a person coming to a close and inviting thirteen strangers to the funeral. These could be any thirteen people, but they have been chosen. Lidia is literally dragged to the meeting by her friend Meredith, who is in it, which makes it all the more of a mystical commingling, that she should not even be attending the U of O, not even be in the writer’s program when she takes this class. That she is the thirteenth member. She has set herself out to be the odd one out, the unlucky thirteen, but also something new, a potentially exciting and dynamic force. Which I am sure is very much how it was at the time. The bond she suggests between herself and Kesey as parents suffering from the death of their children, newborn or otherwise, as drunks suffering from the horror of themselves, as a faint hope, that perhaps she can save this man from himself and in so doing nurture in him another masterpiece, that this great man who is drifting away is very tenderly handing his legacy off to her as a second father, makes for a touching chapter, although she makes a point of treating offhandedly the most tender moment in it:

“”I’ve seen a lot of writers come and go. You’ve got the stuff. It’s in your hands. What are you going to do next?

“I opened my eyes and looked at my hands. They looked extremely dumb.

“'Next?' I said.

“'You know, in your life. What’s next?'” (122)

There is plenty of tender description, of Kesey, his smell, even his constant Vodka consumption is dealt with lovingly, but it’s that he gives her this option, when she thought she had no options, that he takes all that he means to her, all that his name and his books mean to her, and uses them to help give her a way out from digging her own grave, that she does not have to be the zombie she perceives herself to be, but can be something more, something sublime as he is: “You’ve got the stuff. It’s in your hands.”  This is a miraculous statement, or a statement that can produce miracles at least.

What I always find most fascinating is the cult, how this person who is just a person becomes a name with a person attached, and how this person becomes a hypnotic force and how this person becomes a kind of magician who can alter and shape our lives. We have all had persons who have somehow shaped our trajectory. We have walked into walls for years on end, and then someone to whom we’ve given a power says to us that there are no walls, and then we are free to walk through them. Or you might not have, but this is what I see Mr. Kesey doing for Lidia, and it is a gift he gives her. He has given her the gift of self-respect. His broken-down life and his love have opened up the possibility for this discussion between them, and rather than exploit it as many a worse human being might have, he uses this connection to help her, to give her the words she needs, to profess his faith in her.

As for the other members of the class, they are treated as a kind of lamenting fog that follows the great man from room to room, and it’s the small statements she says about them that make them all the more intriguing, that one became the group’s “Judas” and another a cop. This is part of the tragedy of greatness as well, that we lose ourselves in it, that a person could become so large, that everyone around him or her ceases to exist. Of course, there was a part of me that got off on the anecdotal star-fucking quality of it all as well, e.g. “Kesey was the best liar I ever met in my life.” That is a wonderful little phrase that encompasses so many potential myths surrounding the man. Makes me think of Oscar Wilde and his statement that fiction was a “beautiful untruth,” that our favorite prophets are always charlatans. It is lovely to talk this way about the truly great, and lovely to read others speaking in this way.

I have always been enamored of writers who seemed charlatans but aware that they were nothing more than charlatans even while midposture on the pages of posterity. Hunter S. Thompson and Graham Greene are the first to come to mind for some reason, perhaps because they were both journalists and seemed to have learned a little bit of hamming-it-up-ery from their earlier profession. But both of these are also notorious drunks, like our Mr. Kesey from this chapter, and so many of our favorite modernist and proto-post-modernist favorites. I remember being a young boy and saying to myself that I wasn’t going to end up that way, “because it’s been done and done to death,” like a bad haircut that was once fashionable. But now, some years later, I’ve become a little more forgiving of all those lost and pathetic figures who wrote those remarkable books that I once read with such impassioned reverence.

Writing is an interesting craft because it would seem that if a person is to learn to write remarkable prose he must learn to live, but that in learning to write remarkable prose so many of our favorite writers become incapable of living. There’s an amazing book by the notorious editor Malcolm Cowley (who discovered both Faulker and Kerouac) called Exile’s Return, in which he describes his generation going off to WWI and many remarkable descriptions of the authors he met, especially, Joyce, Proust, and Hemingway. Joyce comes off as just a man who needs a letter sent but has become overwhelmed by this simple task.  And then later, “In Joyce the will had developed immoderately; in Proust it seemed almost to be atrophied. Not only his passions but his merest whims were stronger than his desire to control them, and he dispassionately watched himself doing silly things -- it was almost as if the living Marcel Proust were an unpleasant but fascinating visitor in the house of his mind.”

* * *

Who are our idols? Why do we follow them? What can they offer us? Who has changed your life? How did they do it?

Chapter 16: Swimming with Amateurs

It says a lot for an author when, after a week of eighteen-hour days spent reading and analyzing literature, I choose (as in can’t put down) to read her book instead of paint my nails and watch Clueless as planned.

I picked up Lidia’s book last Friday to get a feel for the text and what questions I should be considering in preparation for writing this guest post. My intention was to only read a few chapters, because there is little time for pleasure reading while I’m in school. (That’s where I am now, by the way, sitting in a stiff-backed chair in the thin-walled library with a stack of essays on nineteenth century aesthetics, Virginia Woolf, and psychoanalytic criticism of The Sound and the Fury. [Seriously, if I have to read one more essay about the gravity of female virginity, I’m going to start burning books.])

Not only do I barely have time to read for pleasure (let’s be real: I barely have time to read everything I need to for class), but the last thing I want to do after reading from sunup to well after sundown is read anything I don’t absolutely have to.

Except, last Friday I picked up Lidia’s book, and my evening of watching Amy Heckerling’s retelling of Emma and licking Doritos crumbs from my fingerprints went out the window. [Resist temptation to make textual connection to Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway.] Where I’m going with this is here: this book is good. Like chest-grabbing, can’t-turn-the-pages-fast-enough, someone-get-me-a-book-light-because-I’m-going-to-be-reading-this-all-night good.

The chapter “Swimming with Amateurs” is about an evening Lidia spent “night swimming” with Ken Kesey and three other friends who are all “totally, completely, unapologetically, rocket shot high.” In this chapter, Lidia and Ken speak of their deceased children (his killed at the age of twenty in a car crash, and hers “pink and rose-lipped” and stillborn). As they swim under the occasionally shadowed moon, Lidia uses piecemeal memories of the evening to explain to how meeting Ken “so close to death brought writing into [her] hands.” In this moment of utter grief, a moment in which Lidia admits to being numb from the death of her daughter, writing, like a way out, is put in front of her.

And writing is a way out, isn’t it? Putting experience into words, whether it is through writing or retelling, objectifies it. It puts it outside of us, in front of us, and into concrete terms to be manipulated and examined objectively.  It’s why talking about loss is better than not talking about it. It’s why authors obsessively rewrite the same story until it takes adequate shape outside the confines of their minds. Last year, for a class I took on Trauma and the Literature of Survival I read more trauma theory than any one person should. I read a lot of Freud, yes, but I also read a wonderful book by a woman who met with holocaust survivors and asked them to tell their stories. Unlike many historians who had approached them, this author was trying to capture the feeling of their experience, not the historical truth. Faced with this open-ended ability to talk, these men and women began forming a narrative: they told of losing friends, of losing their homes, of losing fathers, mothers, sisters, and brothers. After decades of dealing with the most immense of traumas, talking about their experiences was the only way they were able to make sense of them. It didn’t lessen the pain (nothing, I imagine, ever does), but it did give it shape. Telling their stories took their repeating memories of trauma and put them into words.

In “Sketch of the Past,” Virginia Woolf (yes, you’re going to have to get used to the Woolf and Faulkner references for the next five weeks) describes how writing, rewriting, and finally capturing her mother successfully in the form of Mrs. Ramsay in To The Lighthouse was helpful in laying the trauma of her mother’s death (she died when Virginia was thirteen) to rest: “I ceased to be obsessed with my mother. I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her. I suppose that I do for myself what psychoanalysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest.” Narrative objectifies traumatic experience and renders it comprehensible. Even though Virginia would sneer at the suggestion, writing is therapeutic.

Of course I don’t mean to be emotionally simplistic and insensitive. I don’t mean to suggest that writing about trauma instantly cures one of its effects. In Virginia Woolf’s biography by Hermione Lee, the author questions whether Virginia “exorcise[d] her mother as completely as she tells herself she has” since she “goes on, after To The Lighthouse, calling her death to mind, and is still trying to describe her—and still finding it difficult—at the end of her life.” Creating narrative does not necessarily “cure” trauma, but it can certainly aid in its integration.

Here’s my admission of bias on this topic: I went night swimming once, not too long ago. I belly-flopped into the black water of Lake Champlain with my nose plugged between my thumb and forefinger, while the man I had loved for ten years dove over me and into the water, his perfect body curved like a parenthesis. Like Lidia, this night inspired words, words that served as a means of objectifying my experience. “I don’t want to forget this,” I thought the next day after we had parted on the side of the road. I wanted to get it all down, but I also wanted to make sense of it. If I wrote the right words, I thought, if I saw it all there in front of me—his toe rubbing against mine on the bed, the tart pop of blueberry pie, the suddenness with which he had reached under the water and inside the wet lip of my bathing suit, his goose-pimpled skin submerged and blue in the moonlight—I could understand it. I needed to give it form. I needed to get it out of my head. So I sat on my bed and wrote and cried and tried to remember everything.

* * *

Does writing help you sort through your experiences, or do you write only after you’ve made sense of your experiences? Are you more like Julia Alvarez who believes that one should wait seven years before writing about an event (an experience, like a wound, she says, needs time to breathe before it is assigned words)? In what ways has narrative helped you process difficult and/or traumatic events in your life? In what ways is your writing therapeutic?

The Chronology of Water: An Interview with Lidia Yuknavitch

1.

WHO IS LIDIA YUKNAVITCH?

MOLLY GAUDRY: Hi Lidia, thank you for allowing me to showcase your incredible memoir, The Chronology of Water, as one of The Lit Pub’s inaugural Book of the Month features. I think the first thing a lot of readers would like to know is: Who is Lidia Yuknavitch? Why did she write this memoir?

LIDIA YUKNAVITCH: Well I think in most ways I’m like anyone who lives a rather fragmented, speed oriented, media saturated existence right now. . . . I’m a global citizen! Ha. But more to the point of this book and why I wrote it, I’m a body. Something that has always bugged me about mainstream and conventional literature is that the body is in the background and the personality or psychology is in the foreground. In my book, while I was chafing at the confines and conventions of “memoir,” I decided to write a body story. So you could say the body holds the point of view in this book.

But I also wrote this book to get what was inside of me out. I had a hunch there were others like me out there. Some people sing or kick ass on an instrument, some people paint or dance or make films, I write. . . . It’s all I’ve got.

MG: If The Chronology of Water is a book about “the body,” then who should read it? Who is it for?

LY: Anyone. I say that because I am moving from ordinary experience through the body. We all share in that story. It’s a Whitmanesque desire -- to contribute to the poetics of bodies. Only in my story some of the bodies ordinarily hidden or repressed or transgressed or ignored or made to feel ugly or bad or wrong, get a voice. People who share that experience might want to read it, and people who don’t share that experience might learn something about the rest of us.

MG: I agree with you that anyone who has been “ignored or made to feel ugly or bad or wrong” should read The Chronology of Water. This is one of the reasons I’m so in love with what you’ve done here. Was it difficult to write a memoir? To expose yourself? Do you feel vulnerable? What are you feeling now that this book is available to readers worldwide?

LY: Like my vagina is on my head. The writing didn’t make me feel exposed. The process was one of the more important artistic productions of my life. But the letting go of the book . . . the putting it into the hands of others . . . that part is terrifying. What if someone tells me it smells of poo? Or that I suck?

Still, I’m one of those people who holds no territory in terms of my own books . . . once they are written, they are not “mine.” And since I wrote them I must want to tenderly hand it over to an other, so maybe that’s the important gesture.

It does feel different from other books I’ve written because in the past I’ve inhabited a sort of alienated place as a writer and projected a playfully antagonistic voice out to the reader. In this book I felt an overwhelming sympathy for whoever my reader is, since she probably understands some of my story, and so a little bit I want to tell her I love her.

Him too.

MG: Nobody is going to say your book “smells of poo.” I’ll see to that. Now that we’ve covered that, what is your greatest fear related to this memoir?

LY: I suppose that some critic of note will slam it and forever relegate it to the shit pile. But when I really consider that, it seems like a silly fear. So that leads me to believe it isn’t real. I didn’t write the book for any critic who may end up slamming it. And I’ve been slammed by some heavy hitters in terms of male authority (the critic’s symbolic place in society), so who cares? If I survived this life, I can survive a surly critic.

I’m guessing the fear under all fears that I don’t particularly want to name is already named in the book. It’s the fear of standing up. It’s the fear of having heart.

MG: What is your greatest accomplishment, related to this memoir?

LY: The cover! Ha. Seriously though, the cover is a big deal. You know the story. But something I’m proud of in terms of how I structured the story is that I THINK readers can enter and exit it without feeling bound to my personal saga. I THINK the structure has fissures where any body can slip in to the water or leave with their own stories. At least that was the aim of breaking all the conventions down.

MG: What is your greatest hope for The Chronology of Water?

LY: That someone will hold it in their hands, read it, and feel less alone.

2.

THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER and WOMEN

MG: The Chronology of Water incorporates a number of themes that seem universal to so many young girls’ and women’s lives. Do you see this is a book for women?

LY: Well I do, but not exclusively. I think I’ve attempted to give voice to some things in the lives of girls and women that get repressed by culture. No doubt. For example, our sexual development. Our emotional intensities -- particularly in the areas we are not supposed to talk about like rage or violence or sexual excess. Our power(s). The fucked upedness of some of the models of “empowerment” that are options for us that are really big fat booby traps.

But I do not think it is a book for women exclusively. In fact I know it’s not. I know it because my close male friends whose bodies have also been transgressed, or men I know who have suffered prison time, or gay, bisexual or transgendered men I am close to, or hunky heteros like the guy I’m married to, or fathers, brothers, sons, junkies, musicians, artists, filmmakers who are men -- they all seem to find themselves in these stories too.

I think that is because the culture crushes all of us in terms of our best selves and bodies and spirits. So that I use a woman’s body as the metaphor for experience should not be read as an exclusivity.

Besides, that male body used to universalize experience, that jesus dude, turns out his body story just doesn’t cover everything. So I’m aiming to get the bodies of women and girls back into the line up to cover the rest of us.

MG: I like that you say this book is bodies, not just women or women’s bodies. While we’ll get to each of these many kinds of bodies later in this interview, I want to talk about women and the bond they often share. I’d like to talk about sisters -- yours, yes -- but also about sisterhood in general. First, let’s talk about your sister. She appears quite frequently in The Chronology of Water. One of my favorite passages follows:

“One morning my sister heard me sobbing in the shower. She pulled the curtain back, looked at me holding my empty gutted belly, and stepped inside to embrace me. Fully clothed. We stayed like that for about 20 minutes I think. Possibly the most tender thing anyone has ever done for me in my entire life.”

Please tell us anything you like about this moment.

LY: It really is a big moment in the book for me because it was a pivotal moment in my life. A life or death moment, to be honest. I was thinking of calling it quits that day in the shower. It was a simple thought, and for those who read the book, a recurring thought, but that day it was particularly stark. I just thought, I can’t do this. I don’t know why or how she did what she did except that she says it was what to do. That tells you something about her and why writing about her should be its own book. The kind of “love” born between our two bodies and lives in the shower is not one I’ve ever heard of or read about or seen in a movie. You are just going to have to trust me when I say it was an altered state. Or one of those lifedeathbeingnotbeing horizons.

MG: This is one of the hidden joys of reading The Chronology of Water. So much goes unsaid, and it’s up to the reader to make connections. I didn’t know this about that moment in the shower. All I knew is that the power of your words blew me away. I am thankful to your sister for being there for you then, because I believe this book has the potential to keep a lot of others from “calling it quits.” I believe this book is a sister for all of us -- a sister who will come along at just the right moment and save our lives . . . because you survived. And this book is proof. And people need proof of others’ survival to know that they, too, can get back up and try a little harder today. And tomorrow. And the next day. One day at a time. Should anyone come here in need of such reassurance: What would you like to say to that person?

LY: I’d say art is with you. All around you. I’d say when there doesn’t seem to be anyone else, there is art. I’d say you can love art how you wish to be loved. And I’d say art is a lifeline to the rest of us -- we are out here. You are not alone. There is nothing about you that scares us. There is nothing unlovable about you, either. Let’s make some shit up.

I think too you are right -- that I was secretly trying to make a sisterbook.

MG: Let’s get back to your sister. What questions did you ask yourself or struggle with when it came time to depicting her on the page?

LY: With my sister -- this is kind of funny -- I have about nine chapters about my sister. They are not in the book. Writing about my sister quickly turns into a big fat HOMAGE because my love for her is so intense I immediately start writing her story instead of my own. If you saw us together you’d see -- it’s the intimacy and iron bond of sister survivors, certainly. But it’s more. She was my first love. My other better mother. She was my first loss when she left home. She was who I fled to when I left home. Ocean and shore and beautiful other.

My mother and sister are not depicted fully or even authentically on the pages. Though my sister seems to think I got my mother pretty well pinned/penned. In the end I could only tell a certain part of a story in which they figure.

So I decided to write another book someday about this sister experience. And ALL the HUGE VARIETIES of ways women are in relationship to other women. It’s ungodly and someone needs to write about it properly. Hope I survive it.

3.

THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER and MOTHERS

MG: Here’s an excerpt you wrote about your mother:

“Sometimes I think my voice arrived on paper. I had a journal I hid under my bed. I didn’t know what a journal was. It was just a red notebook that I wrote pictures and true things and lies in. . . . I wrote about my mother . . . the back of her head driving me to and from swim practice. Her limp and leg. Her hair. How gone she was, selling houses, winning awards into the night. I wrote letters to my gone away sister that I never sent. . . . When I was 11 I wrote a poem in my red notebook that went: In the house/alone in my bed/my arms ache. My sister is gone/my mother is gone/my father designs buildings/in the room next to mine/he is smoking. I wait for 5 a.m./I pray to leave the house/I pray to swim.”

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you read this passage?

LY: How I was, even then, trying to write a counter-story to the story of family. I also think about how daughters inherit the pain of their mothers. . . . I first thought and read about that with true understanding when I read The Lover by Duras. The mother’s pain drifts down the DNA into the daughter in a maternal line that I understand. My mother’s depression and anger and pain crept down genetic lines to my sister and I and embedded into our very bodies -- though differently in each of us. There is a grief reserved for mothers. Something about bearing children corporeally leaves a trace of sadness that is never quite sutured.

When I look at that passage I can see all three of us -- little women -- doing what we each had to in order to stay alive literally and figuratively. And then I see and feel the “weight” of father, literally and figuratively. There is the whole symbolic order. The difficult version. Not the loving possibility of family but the wounded one.

I also see a violent hope though. Is that weird? My sister and I are alive. We are both writers. My sister is a poet. She is also a healer, and I am a teacher. We are choosing to give of ourselves in spite of what was taken.

MG: In terms of “what was taken,” you share in your memoir that your father would not allow you to go away to college, that offers came in the mail but he refused to let you leave. However, your mother intervened:

“A week later, when the papers came to sign, my father was at work. My mother signed them. I remember watching her hand, a little stunned. She had beautiful handwriting. Then she put them in the envelope, grabbed her car keys, and told me C’mawn. In her southern drawl liquor voice. In her real estate station wagon. Driving to the post office with her and watching her drop my freedom into the blue metal mouth of the mailbox -- I almost loved her.”

What does it mean that you “almost loved her”?

LY: My mother and I fought a lot. I’m actually grateful for it -- we had a very real relationship partly because we fought. But at the time those letters about college -- or my impending possible leaving -- were coming in the mail, I was caught in a deep feeling of anger, mistrust, and betrayal where she was concerned.

Why hadn’t she taken her daughters out of his house as children? Why didn’t she save us? Why was she so busy building her career in Real Estate and creating a life outside her home that the pain of her daughter didn’t signify? That part of her I hated.

Much later of course I came to understand her story.

And I came to know the women at the door: pain, depression, loss, despair.

When other women tell me how much they loved their mothers, I am filled with a strange wonder. I stay quiet, because I know my “love” was different. It was fierce and loud and the moments of tenderness were quiet, something between our eyes, something in the way she called me “Belle.”

MG: What sorts of challenges did you face as you were depicting her on the page?

LY: I could write a book about that. Wait. . . . I just did! Ha. I know what you are asking though. What I had to deal with as a writer confronting the page in terms of my mother was the vastness of her pain (physical and emotional), and how to get her unbelievable imagination and joy to surface. Pain was the overriding presence in her life. And yet she had moments of joy that I witnessed that could not be outdone by even the happiest child. And in the tiniest of moments she could muster a strength that could shatter a world. A strength that could free a daughter from a father’s house.

MG: You write several times of your mother’s body, about how one leg is shorter than the other and how she shouldn’t have had children. But she did. Why do you think she did?

LY: Yes it’s an interesting question to me, still, since Dr.’s told her if she carried to term she risked injury to the infant or even death. Because of how tilted her hips and birth canal were. So was she doing something loving and miraculous and wonderful? Or something sadistic? I know that’s an odd thing to say but I do wonder sometimes, you know? WHAT was she thinking?

But maybe I know what she was thinking. She was thinking what they told her didn’t signify. Like when they told her she was crippled, she danced. Hard. In high school. She danced her heart out she danced her leg right she danced her sexuality.

And when they told her no one would want her or marry her so she should become a librarian and shut the doors of woman she hot night seduced a rodeo boy and an artist and a musician.

And when they told her she couldn’t run or swim or ride a bike she became the “could not” -- she shattered it like broken bone piles -- she remade meaning in the image of her imagined body.

So I guess what I believe is that she didn’t think the regular lexicon on rules or realities applied to her. Until the day she died she swore she saw a sea serpent over the side of the Golden Gate Bridge, and a UFO in Port Arthur, Texas, and she swore she loved her children.

MG: If you could say anything to your mother right now, what would that be?

LY: What I said in the endlines. Mother, rest. I am home.

4.

THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER and STILLBIRTH

MG: What is the greatest sorrow you have experienced?

LY: The death of my daughter, Lily.

MG: How do you live with it every day? I mean, how do you cope?

LY: Well I have learned to let grief live with me like a little girl in the house. And I am a writer, so storytelling is how to keep going. To open my self up, my grief, my love, my difficulties, my joys, to share my life and body and words so that they join the human story greater than my own.

MG: Why does this book open with the birth and loss of your daughter?

LY: Because that is the body event that “opened” me. I mean it broke me. Utterly. But it broke me OPEN. I became a writer from that experience. Not instantly, in the moment I went fairly insane, as I wrote about. But later. The first thing that came out of me when my wits and emotions settled back toward something bearable was writing. As it turns out, there was a lot in there. . . . I think I have many, many books to say.

I also opened at a birthdeath moment because I no longer believe in the idea that birth is a beginning and death is an end. In terms of life or narrative. They are merely continuations and changes in matter and energy. Energy never dies. It just changes form.

Lastly, because of what I know about how memory works from reading about biochemistry and neuroscience. There’s nothing linear about it. At all. That’s just a comforting conceptual shape we bring to the chaotic processes of memory that are generated in our bodies from a variety of sources and systems.

MG: You share that you lied to people when they asked about your daughter:

“I lied without even hesitating an instant. I’d say, “Oh, she is the most beautiful baby girl! Her eyelashes are so long!” Even two years later when a woman I know stopped me in the library to ask after my new daughter, I said, “She’s so wonderful -- she’s my light. In day care she is already drawing pictures!” I never thought, stop lying.”

Where did this urge come from? Is it with you still?

LY: The urge to lie? Aren’t all writers liars? Maybe all humans? Lying has gotten a bum wrap. Narrativizing, storytelling, those are human qualities that are amazing. The urge to make stories up. If I hadn’t made stories up my whole life I’d be dead I think. I think that’s an admirable quality, if by “lying” we mean creating fictions beautifully against the grain of culture’s physical and psychic atomizing tendencies.

I don’t like lies that come from places of power and oppression. I don’t like politicians or cultural “authorities” who lie. I don’t like the lies born of “gender” or “religion” or “family” or “criminality” or the cult of good citizenship that cause an individual to believe there is something wrong with them. I don’t like the lie called power, or the lie that some people are inferior to others, or the lie that humans are superior to the environment or animals.

The best liars I’ve ever met or known are my favorite writers, musicians, artists and filmmakers. They are of the first variety. I hope they lie their asses off.

5.

THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER and WOMEN’S REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS

MG: Is it true that you had three abortions before you were twenty-one?

LY: Yes. And I am not in the minority here. But it isn’t a story women are particularly allowed to tell. Certainly not truthfully. It is a story entirely unsanctioned by culture and it points to one’s fall from the cult of good citizenship, the cult of the clean and proper body, and a certain definition of “ethics” and “morals” that, coincidentally, relegates the body of a woman to an inferior and powerless position inherited from patriarchal religious mythology.

I know this is not a popular position to express but our bodies, like all of nature, energy and matter, are killing and reproducing all the time. The union of sperm and egg is a process generative of new life and yet lethal to both sperm and egg. Compost piles breed life. Study quasars. Black holes. Cosmic string. Study ecosystems. Animal populations. Chemistry. Even the cult of Christianity is based on a lifegiving death.

On the other hand, I feel like RIGHT NOW is also an important time to discuss precisely and openly how important women’s reproductive rights, women’s health, and women’s control over their own bodies are. I don’t want MORE abortions. No woman is happy having an abortion. It’s an emotionally wrenching decision. But from my point of view it is not a scientifically wrenching decision.

But I also don’t want old white male corrupt legislation crawling up the cunt of a woman’s being, nor do I want women’s bodies to be the “site” of political battles as if we were breeding livestock, slaves, or meat sack commodities. So fighting (again again again) for women’s reproductive rights, rights to health care, and the right to be self determined bodies free from economic and morality fictions is (again again again) violently vital.

6.

THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER and BISEXUALITY and MEN

MG: Can you tell us about your first experience with another woman?

LY: Yes. I think you mean sexually though. Do you? If you do, then I’d say my first sexual experience with another woman was with my mother. Specifically at the pre-linguistic stage with her breast and body, and later, post-language acquisition, I’d say the the erotic object attachment to the scar on her leg.

When she would get out of the bathtub or shower and dress, I was often in the bathroom with her. And the great white pearling scar railroading up the side of her leg mesmerized me. I’m positive I experienced erotic feelings, though I hadn’t an understanding of it of course. But I remember sweating. And feeling very antsy. And being unable to keep myself from reaching out and touching it. I remember my hand on her leg and I remember shaking. Dizzy. Almost passing out. I think she’d just laugh, say “Oh Belle,” and sort of brush my hand away, dry off, and get dressed.

Then I suppose it’s true too that I was attracted to my sister -- she was eight years older than me and she looked a little opposite to me -- she had long, auburn hair and a full figured body. I had white non-hair fuzz from swimming and a boy body. Her distance in age made her mythic to me. Her bedroom was mythic to me. Everything about her -- mythic. When she left I had nowhere to put any of those feelings about my body and my love and devotion, and she left when I was ten, so puberty was just around the corner.

But I’m guessing the question is more about my first experience OUTSIDE of or beyond my mother and sister. I just feel it’s important to name those before I move on.

And here the answer is easy.

I was competing with a poolful and lockeroomfull of girls and women from the time I was six years old on. All that gorgeous naked flesh in steamed up or watery places nearly made me faint on a daily basis. I was probably oversexualized at a young age because of my father, so my drives -- my pistons were firing way before I understood what they meant.

I was attracted to my two best friends when I was five. Six. Seveneightnineten.

I was in love with my teacher when I was eleven.

I wanted to be Joan of Arc at twelve -- I cried in bed thinking about her body while humping pillows.

In seventh grade, my childhood best friend and I took to soaping up each other butt to butt in lockerroom showers. And liking it. A lot.

I had my first orgasm WITH another girl when I was thirteen. There was lot of . . . hmmm. Twinkie mashing. And finger-fucking. We had no idea what we were doing. I’m not even sure we knew what “orgasms” were. But it was hot, and wet, and slippery, and very, very good.

And nothing about my father.

MG: Of the many men in your memoir, who was (or is) the most influential in your life? Why?

LY: My father, because he gave and took everything simultaneously, and my son Miles, because from him I know what being alive is for.

MG: I totally expected a different answer. Can you elaborate? Perhaps you could offer a representative excerpt from The Chronology of Water that best captures how your father “gave and took everything simultaneously” and how Miles teaches you “what being alive is for”?

LY: Yeah I can see why that answer is counter-intuitive. But as I write about in the book, the fact of the matter is that my father showed me art. He introduced me to Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture -- to the seriousness of space and light and form. He introduced me to classical music. To painting. To film. He spoke in sophisticated ways about aesthetics and themes and archetypes and the power of artistic production. He explained to me what the Guggenheim and the Tate were. He took me to see Shakespeare’s plays in Ashland, Oregon from the time I was eight until I left the house.

I saw The Deer Hunter and 2001: A Space Odyssey and Apocalypse Now and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Cool Hand Luke and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Silkwood, with him.

He bought me a Selmer Series 10 clarinet.

He gave me my first typewriter, my first drawing pad, my first set of sophisticated pens.

MG: You know I expected the answer to be Andy, right? Can you give us a representative excerpt for how you feel about him right now?

LY: Who, my father? Or Andy?

Miles is my lifesource, and Andy is my being equal. It’s a little Jungian to me -- his masculinity stands up to my feminine, but his feminine also draws out my masculine -- I don’t know how we found each other but it’s like an energy loop. That doesn’t sound very romantic I suppose but in lidiaworld it’s a lot bigger deal than a Hollywood romanticism.

You know it’s true though that I don’t think I’d be alive if I hadn’t met Andy and Miles. And I mean that both literally and symbolically.

MG: What can you tell us about divorce? It’s not uncommon, but it is definitely a scary and unique experience for anyone going through it for the first time. Screw it. Let’s not call it divorce. Let’s call it “breaking up.” What can you tell us about that?

LY: It’s death. It’s exactly death. But the thing about it is, you can’t get through a life, and by that I mean a rich, fully lived life, without experiencing deaths of all sorts. The death of a relationship the death of an idea the deaths of people the death of truths the death of desires the death of animals the death of planets and stars and, well, everything.

Divorce or breaking up is particularly hard on us because loving is such a huge risk. You risk everything, loving all the way. You risk your world. Your selfhood. Your ability to know. Your individual being. Your reality.

I don’t really give a hootie about the part of “divorce” that is attached to the marriage contract. But our hearts and bodies and thoughts. Our being. Breaking up is a death. The hardest part is to admit it’s worth it. To experience a full love, even unto death. It’s worth it.

There’s no such think as a fully lived life without pain. Honestly I could another book about how clusterfucked American culture is on the topic of pain. Talk about an undiscovered continent. We’ve coded pain in ways that keep us from learning jack shit from one of the most profound experiences available. Wish we could undo or redo that.

MG: How were your marriages different from each other?

LY: In my first marriage I was a confused ball of nuclear rage and creative fire without a form. In my second marriage I was insane with grief and numbed myself with laughter and every excess imaginable, including writing. In my third marriage I am learning what being is.

I can’t speak for the three men. I loved them. I loved them differently. I would not change anything about them. But my relationship with Andy is the most real to me. It changes and grows. It’s alive. And I’m fully present.

As for marriage, I’m for it!!! Get married as many times as possible!!! I think anyone who wants to, should GET TO. NOW. And I think it is possible to invent it from the inside out, rather than live it from the scripts we’re handed.

MG: Will you tell us something uplifting and wonderful about your current marriage? About a moment that you’ve experienced recently, that you wouldn’t mind sharing?

LY: With the Mingo, it’s perpetually epic. He’s better than your favorite novel or film.

7.

THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER and PROMISCUITY

MG: Kerry Cohen blurbed The Chronology of Water, and I love that she did. I remember reading her memoir and thinking how incredibly brave she is for writing it. I feel the same way about you, though in many ways I think Chronology is a different kind of memoir. Let’s do some one-word answers. Are you ready? Just give me the first word you think of.

Sex is ________.

LY: exploration

MG: Sex can be __________.

LY: revelatory

MG: The first time I had sex, I ________.

LY: exploded

MG: When my son has sex for the first time I hope he ___________.

LY: supernovas

8.

THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER and DRUGS & ALCOHOL

MG: Why drugs? Why alcohol?

LY: To leave planet Lidia, to anesthetize, to dream, to discover.

MG: I am positive that people -- young and old alike -- will find this interview on the Internet, perhaps in times of pain and in need of guidance, particularly where drugs and alcohol are involved. I don’t doubt that parents, too, might find this site. What would you like to say to them now -- either to the individual who is looking for help or to parents?

LY: I can’t parent anyone’s children but my own. I am not a parent of anyone else’s children. I am a writer. But my stories are not unique, and so by reading them, perhaps there is some insight for someone moving through life with difficulty about how not to give up. Or how to get hold of your own story. But too, my parents failed us in some important ways. And if a parent can “see” the me’s that were struggling, and how I needed some help, maybe they can admit that we are all living out stories of ourselves.

I have a close friend named Cheryl Strayed. Her mother saved she and her siblings -- meaning she got them away from an abusive father. My mother did not. But Cheryl’s mother also died at the age of 46, and left such a tremendous grief inside her daughter; Cheryl loved her mother deeply. I don’t any longer blame my mother for not getting us away from my father. I can admit she had a story too, one that came before me. I can admit her story.

Cheryl and I both turned out to be writers. And mothers. And people who can feel and receive and give compassion. Love. So maybe part of what I’d say is about stories. Find the stories you identify with. Find the stories that challenge your world view. Tell your story to anyone who will listen. Never suppress an other’s story. Let lifestories exist alongside one another. Bear witness to them. Do not ever let your own story drown out someone else’s. Find the people whose stories make good companions to your own. Make a braid.

9.

THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER and WATER

MG: What does water mean to you? I know it took a whole book to answer this, but if you can give us an excerpt or a short answer here, that would be fantastic.

LY: Water provides me with a central metaphor for my life. I guess I think that’s kind of important. To explore and discover metaphors that help you live with your life and how it is and what it was and what it might be. I like metaphors a great deal more than sentences. Within metaphor there is still the resonance of image, play, varied meaning and interpretation. Never only one meaning.

But there is a literalness to it too. In water I am without physical pain. It’s the only way to be pain free at this point in my life without medication. I have a 22% scoliosis -- chronic back pain, also hip pain. So being weightless is freedom from pain.

It’s also a meditative space for me now. The MOMENT I enter the water, I mean it’s almost Pavlovian -- I can enter a trance or meditative space. Which is why I like to be in it as often as possible!

And even though it smells way to poo poo Christian to say this, there is a baptismal feeling you get from entering and leaving water. So maybe I can say I am FOR the secular baptism. May it bring you love. May it wash you clean of cultural scripts and religious mumbo jumbo. May it carry us like the sediments that rocks become.

MG: You share in your book that you sort of collect swimmers. Who is your favorite person to swim with?

LY: My sister. But hardly anyone agrees to swim with me . . .

MG: When were you last in the water?

LY: Yesterday.

MG: Tell us about the first time you were in the water.

LY: Well like you, I was in amniotic fluid. Flip turning, no doubt, in the womb of my then world. They tell me when I was two I would jump in pools or off of the side of lake docks. I think something about water always drew me. I’ve yet to locate something genetic about that . . . but I do believe quite firmly in mermaids. And seals and whales are very magical to me.

MG: How has water changed for you over time?

LY: As a child I played in the bathtub with my sister. At the pool I swam laps, but I also goofed off, like kids do. The pool -- its colors and smells and sensory reality -- its Whitmanesque community -- the “I” in the “we” -- a body alone in water and all the otherness -- swimmers -- is more familiar to me than any other sense of “place” in my life.

Water was my space of joy, freedom, play. My sense of self, competition, surrender.

I still go to the ocean or rivers to both complete my self and let it go to everything which is larger than self. It takes about ten second of staring and listening and smelling for the ocean or rivers to remember me.

For me, water is the perfect metamorphosis environment. It’s life giving. Macro and micro. Water has changed me like the great waters made paths into earth and mountain. Water has rebirthed me hundreds of times. I go to water to feel the truth of things beyond a self. All the colors of water arrest and open me. I hope everyone finds what it is that makes them feel the way water makes me feel.

MG: Can we go swimming together when we finally meet in person?

LY: It would be my distinct pleasure.