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.
What you will find? A fearless, balls-to-the-wall approach to storytelling that reaches deep into the bowels of human existence to describe what it actually feels like to do the invigorating, backbreaking work of fully living on the edge — and coming out the other side a changed person ... But it’s not what Yuknavitch discusses this time around that makes this memoir both so provocative and expansive (though who doesn’t want more gritty sex scenes or gorgeous sentences describing how grief settles underneath the skin?). It’s the way she uses her experiences to blow up the concept of a personal identity that’s fixed in time or place and replace it with a volatile, contradictory, fluid self.
Fans of genre-bending or lyrical memoir will enjoy this multilayered meditation leveraging Yuknavitch’s creativity, thoughtfulness, and sense of wonder.
Brilliant, unflinching, and written with the same heady, literary sophistication as Yuknavitch’s novels. Compounded by real moments of narrative vulnerability, this memoir is as much an act of dismembering as it is of remembering.
