A version of Lidia Yuknavitch’s Reading the Waves chapter “Monster” originally appeared in The Rumpus as an essay, “Spines of the Finwomen,” in 2019.
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Though you will most likely find Lidia Yuknavitch’s new book in the nonfiction section, Yuknavitch defies that definition. Reading the Waves (Riverhead Books, 2025) takes us from the forests of Oregon to the basements and pools of Texas and back again as she tells stories from her life: about the death of her ex-husband, about her life as a teenager and her relationship with her mother, and about her family life with her husband and son. Through her eyes, we watch with awe as a white hummingbird hovers in the air and we stand on the top of a construction crane, looking down at the ground with fear and exhilaration in equal measure. Each part of Reading the Waves is an adventure while at the same time a meditation on love, death, and the act of artistic creation.
I was thrilled to talk with Yuknavitch over the phone about her new book, the act of choosing our paths as writers, and the ways we face and survive pain and trauma.
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The Rumpus: In the preface for the book, you wrote, “I need to read a few episodes from my life, not as facts, but as fictions, as stories that lodge in my body. Is there a way to liberate them?” Can you tell me more about that act of liberation as you see, it?
Lidia Yuknavitch: Sure, I mean not that I know anything more than anyone else knows, but what I’m interested in exploring is the way we carry the things that have happened to us as stories in our bodies, like shit goes down, something happens, and then you move away from it in time. It’s left in your body as the story of what happened. It may have sediments from all kinds of things in your life mixed in with it, stuff from your childhood or stuff from hard times or good times in your life, and it’s like this story stew and you carry it around, and maybe the story changes a little or maybe it never changes. Maybe you misinterpreted the event when it happened because you were in shock or you missed some elements that mattered. So I’m not really tracking facts, I’m tracking the way we carry stories of what happened to us around in our lives and our bodies. Does that make sense? I know when I talk about it, my sternum aches, so it feels true.
Rumpus: The word that came to me as I was reading the book was elegy. This book could be an elegy for Devin but also for your mother and your daughter and even for past versions of yourself. Was that something that you thought about as you wrote?
Yuknavitch: I absolutely thought of that as I wrote. I was writing through expanded understandings of death. There are the deaths that we experience in our lives, the real deaths of people we cared about, but there’s also this sense that we’re living and dying every day, every year, every time we have changes in our lives—those different symbolic kinds of deaths. In that sense, it opened up the question for me about beginnings and endings and endless change and how all death and all change also generates new life or new identity or new ways of being in the world. Even in the natural world when something dies, it gives rise to new life. I don’t mean this in a simplistic way. I don’t mean, “Yay! Death is transformation!” It’s a heavy load to carry. It’s also a way of thinking about death as change, and so those real deaths that happened to me in my life feel different to me than they did, for example, back when I wrote Chronology of Water. And so, to look at death narratively or symbolically reminds us that we’re all dying every second. You’re sloughing off skin cells, hair cells the minute you’re born. There’s only one exit. And I didn’t want to write about it in some dreary way, although I know the story I told is sad. But it also has some humor and some love and some softness and some compassion.
Rumpus: The chapter “Decompositions” begins with a list of mushrooms and moves into a rumination on the idea of getting lost. In what ways is getting lost an important concept for you as an artist?
Yuknavitch: I guess I’ve never known where the hell I was. Pretty much all the paths laid out for me, or that I understood were laid out by my culture—paths like wife or mother or get married or get a job—I’ve stepped into those paths and then found myself lost in all of them. And so, for me, it’s profoundly true that choosing again and again to be an artist is to loosen my grip on the roles that I’m handed and the paths that are open to me because they don’t work on me the way they seem to work on other people. When I’m inside creativity or making art, it feels like a worthy place for a person like me to spend her life.
Rumpus: That’s wonderful. We do have to choose over and over again, right?
Yuknavitch: Yep, whether you want to or not.
Rumpus: In terms of practical things surrounding the book, how long did it take you to write this book, and what was the process like?
Yuknavitch: Oh, I think this particular book was a year or two, and the process involved coming to it and moving away from it and coming to it and moving away from it [was] pretty much exactly the way an ocean wave moves. I really embrace that metaphor because I couldn’t just sit and write it. I had to pull pieces from the past and invent pieces from in the present and try really hard not to just tell a linear story of where I’m at in my life right now, which would be the expectation and the tradition. And I’ve pretty much never had any interest in the expectation or the tradition, so reading your own life as literary was an important deviation for me, deviation from the tyranny of regular memoir. Yes, I use the word tyranny.
Rumpus: Are you working on anything new right now?
Yuknavitch: I’m moving very close to working on new things, novel things, and kinds of writing that don’t really have a category. I absolutely am trying to cozy up to a new novel idea. I love novel writing, and I love nonfiction writing too. I just wish [nonfiction] would get a blow job and loosen up a little bit.
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Author photograph by Miles Mingo
