The Chronology of Water

The Chronology of Water traces the effect of extreme grief on a young woman’s developing sexuality. With candour and humility, Yuknavitch chronicles her early experiences as a survivor of childhood abuse at the hands of her father and then the birth, just out of her teens, of a stillborn child.From the shattered parts she weaves a narrative shining with the healing power of art, beauty, writing, sibling love, romantic attachment – to men and women – and swimming. It is a journey of addiction, self-destruction, and ultimately survival that finally comes together in the shape of love.

Reviews of The Chronology of Water

A brutal beauty bomb and a true love song. Rich with story, alive with emotion, both merciful and utterly merciless, I am forever altered by every stunning page. This is the book I'm going to press into everyone's hands for years to come. This is the book I've been waiting to read all of my life — CHERYL STRAYED, author of WILD I've read The Chronology of Water, cover to cover, a dozen times. I am still reading it. And I will, most likely, return to it for inspiration and ideas, and out of sheer admiration, for the rest of my life. The book is extraordinary — CHUCK PALAHNIUK, author of FIGHT CLUB Something about this story – the goddamn gorgeous language, the raw power of its brutality – gave me so much comfort and solace. In Yuknavitch's word embrace, I felt the magic of self-acceptance and self-love, and the crazy-wonderful beauty of life * * Huffington Post * * Lidia Yuknavitch is my favorite new writer . . . Genius. The tone is a combination of high and low, with some of the writing literary and metaphorical, some conversational and shock-jockey, all of it fueled by rage and pain and love and art and transformation * * The Atlantic * * Bold and highly unconventional . . . Hot, gritty, unrelenting in its push to dismantle the self and then, somehow, put the self back together again – gets not just under a reader's skin but seeps all the way into her bloodstream * * Publishers Weekly * * I love this book and I am thankful that Lidia Yuknavitch has written it for me and for everyone else who has ever had to sometimes kind of work at staying alive. It's about the body, brain, and soul of a woman who has managed to scratch up through the slime and concrete and crap of life in order to resurrect herself. The kind of book Janis Joplin might have written if she had made it through the fire – raw, tough, pure, more full of love than you thought possible and sometimes even hilarious. This is the book Lidia Yuknavitch was put on the planet to write for us — REBECCA BROWN, author of THE GIFTS OF THE BODY