Description: NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE DIRECTED BY KRISTEN STEWART
From the debris of a troubled early life comes an astonishing tale of survival, a paean to the pursuit of beauty, self-expression, desire--for men and women--and the exhilaration of swimmingTHIS IS NOT YOUR MOTHER'S MEMOIR. In The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch, a lifelong swimmer and Olympic hopeful, escapes her raging father and alcoholic and suicidal mother when she accepts a swimming scholarship which drug and alcohol addiction eventually cause her to lose. What follows is promiscuous sex with both men and women, some of them famous, and some of it S&M, as Lidia discovers the power of her sexuality to help her forget her pain. The forgetting doesn't last, though, and it is her hard-earned career as a writer and teacher, and the love of her husband and son, that ultimately create the life she needs to survive. "I've read Ms. Yuknavitch's book The Chronology of Water, cover to cover, a dozen times . . . The book is extraordinary." --Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club
Brief description: Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of three works of short fiction: Her Other Mouths, Liberty's Excess, and Real to Reel, as well as a book of literary criticism, Allegories of Violence. Her work has appeared in Ms., The Iowa Review, Exquisite Corpse, Another Chicago Magazine, Fiction International, Zyzzyva, and elsewhere. Her book Real to Reel was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and she is the recipient of awards and fellowships from Poets and Writers and Literary Arts, Inc. Her work appears in the anthologies Life As We Show It (City Lights), Forms At War (FC2), Wreckage of Reason (Spuytin Duyvil). In addition she is the founder and publisher of Chiasmus Press and teaches writing, literature, film, and Women's Studies at Mount Hood Community College in Oregon.
Review Quotes: "Raw, intense, and powerful." --Roxane Gay
"Yuknavitch has emerged as a trailblazing literary voice." --Suleika Jaouard "Yuknavitch drives narrative the way rednecks drive muscle cars. Right across your lawn without respect to boundaries." --Vanessa Veselka "Yuknavitch's sex scenes are remarkable among current American novelists, not just for their explicitness but for the way she uses them to pursue questions of agency, selfhood, and the ethical implications of making art." --The New Yorker "Yuknavitch gives voice to the multitude." --The Washington Post "Yuknavitch possesses a great well of empathy for misfits and a great passion for radical art." --The Boston Globe "Yuknavitch's words are incantations." --Elle "In Yuknavitch's hands, words are both swords and feathers . . . She writes with a sensibility that is both blunt and empathic, as if to open the reader's heart and make it bleed." --Ms. Magazine "Yuknavitch is one of the most celebrated contemporary writers." --Electric Literature