Reading the Waves

Reading the Waves



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What makes us return to Yuknavitch again and again is her searing honesty, wide-open compassion, and sensual engagement with this earthly realm. Reading the Waves is brilliant storytelling by one of our most adventurous creatives. It is an investigation into how our stories must shift to accommodate each age, each generation, even as they remain mythically rooted in the ancient archetypal shapes of human transformation. This is a book you will return to again and again for the wild astuteness of its wisdom.
Joy Harjo, 23rd U.S. Poet Laureate

The frank and revealing memoir of a writer who draws from her own creativity to heal.

"I believe our bodies are carriers of experience," Lidia Yuknavitch writes in her provocative memoir Reading the Waves. "I mean to ask if there is a way to read my own past differently, using what I have learned from literature: how stories repeat and reverberate and release us from the tyranny of our mistakes, our traumas, and our confusions."

Drawing on her background -- her father's abuse, her complicated dynamic with her disabled mother, the death of her child, her sexual relationships with men and women -- and her creative life as an author and teacher, Yuknavitch has come to understand that by using the power of literature and storytelling to reframe her memories, she can loosen the bonds that have enslaved her emotional growth. Armed with this insight, she allows herself to look with the eye of an artist at the wounds she suffered and come to understand the transformational power this has to restore her soul. 

By turns candid and lyrical, stoic and forgiving, blunt and evocative, Reading the Waves reframes memory to show how crucial this process  can be to gaining a deeper understanding of ourselves.