"All endings are beginnings."
Five Big Questions with Lidia Yuknavitch
Welcome to today’s installment of Five Big Questions, the short interview series where awesome people answer the questions I’d ask everyone if it were socially acceptable.
Lidia Yuknavitch is a marvel.
Lidia is the award-winning author of the novels Thrust, The Book of Joan, Dora: A Headcase, The Small Backs of Children, and the memoir The Chronology of Water, which was recently adapted for film.
She is also a wonderful human. (If you haven’t yet experienced her TED talk, The Beauty of Being a Misfit, I suggest you do.)
Her most recent book, Reading the Waves, is a gorgeous, fearless, provocative memoir exploring the nature of memory and the power of storytelling to reframe it. Words don’t do it justice; I hope you’ll experience it for yourself.
Without further ado, here’s Lidia, in her own words.
What’s one thing you struggle with that people might be surprised to hear?
They might be surprised to hear that "dailiness" for me is difficult. The ordinary tasks of living a life outside the door of my own home are often a struggle, due to my introversion, anxiety, sorrow, fear (although that's not the right word somehow...distrust?), social difficulties. Those are just shorthand words for feelings I know legions of other people share.
Most days I get past the weight of those kinds of feelings and thoughts (I included thoughts because my brain is filled with unstoppable dancing ideas that are bigger than me), and I sort of NIKE my way through life — just do it. I have strong shoulders from being a lifelong swimmer. My body helps me move through the world. The swimmer in me helps me survive.
I think when people read my books (dang. thank you peoples), they might think I'm courageous in ways that I am not. I'm not brave, I'm stubborn. I want to live out loud to prove that people like me can thrive — alongside each other — in a world that is not necessarily built for us to thrive.
What’s one thing you’re proud of?
I am proud of my son, Miles. I am proud of some sentences I conjured. I guess I am proud of myself for not surrendering to trauma or woe, but I don't think "proud" is the right word...something more like solidarity — I feel solidarity for others who are tenaciously still alive and kicking, and I feel solidarity with those who found they could not stay, too. The living and the dead.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
Never surrender. That used to be my go-to answer for years. And it is still an important concept for me, especially working in community and collaborating with others in times of strife. But another phrase has surfaced recently, a message I received from a seal: All endings are beginnings.
What’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever read?
OH MY OCEANS that is so unfair!!!! HA! Ok two answers:
I find something beautiful in nearly everything I've ever read...there are small emotional intensities, image bursts, lyric pulsars that can emerge in a moment on a page, or even between line, words, in the white spaces. So that is a very real experience for me.
Virginia Woolf's The Waves.
What is one consumable thing you recommend?
Han Kang's book The Vegetarian. I've been meditating a lot on how we are all shapeshifting whether one realizes it or not. I've been thinking about what women might be undergoing in terms of shapeshifting — and I'm not that interested in the question of gender — especially gender binaries, which have lost their usefulness, in my opinion. I'm writing a novel about this idea...and I'm positive my writing is in imaginary conversation with other artists and writers.
Thank you so much, Lidia. You are magic.
As always, thank you for reading. x
“ I feel solidarity for others who are tenaciously still alive and kicking, and I feel solidarity with those who found they could not stay, too. The living and the dead.” I love that.
Also love the exclamation “Oh my oceans!!”
“Oh my oceans” is such an evocative phrase! Depths and unknowable things and the expanse and neverendingness of it. Would it be too on the nose to assume she is a Pisces? Signed, a Scorpio