Tonight: Lidia Yuknavitch Reads About Terrible Things (Better Than Anyone)

• Hawthorne Books

Lidia Yuknavitch writes about terrible things better than anyone. Her memoir The Chronology of Water came out in 2011 from Portand’s own Hawthorne Books—you probably know it from its censored cover, which is wrapped in paper like a girlie magazine on bookstore shelves—but it’s easily one of our best local examples of what has been preciously coined “the new essay” and what I just like to call nonfiction without the false-seeming resolution-heavy arc of the traditional memoir. The Chronology of Water is structurally similar to Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, with water rather than the color blue as an organizing principle, but the similarities end there. Yuknavitch’s subject matter—abuse, ill-advised marriage, her daughter who was “born dead,” heroin addiction, the rage of angry girls—hews more closely to Janet Fitch or Ariana Reines or even, you know, Charles Bukowski. This is some truly fucked up shit, written with a beautiful, poetic economy and without compromise.

So why I am I telling you about a memoir that came out in 2011?

Because you should read it, obviously. But also because Yuknavitch is reading tonight at the Independent Publishing Resource Center. She’s a Portland writer who I’m sure we’ll be seeing big things from in the future. You should go see her while you can.