It's hard to believe that it's been 14 years since THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER landed on my best books of the year list. Lidia Yuknavitch hardly has been idle since then. She has published novels and works of nonfiction, and has developed an innovative workshop practice for writers, visual artists and other creatives interested in exploring the interactions of the body and art. But even though it's been nearly a decade and a half since THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER, Yuknavitch's latest memoir feels in many ways like a companion to that other work, which echoes (or should I say ripples) through these pages. But READING THE WAVES more than stays afloat on its own merits.

Yuknavitch is in her early 60s now, so some of the work of this memoir is about the evolutions that accompany aging. Especially affecting are passages where she reflects on the wrenching mix of joy and loss she feels as her son, Miles, grows up and prepares to head to college. As their family visits the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, she observes Miles, who is 11 at the time:

"Readers who have been following Yuknavitch's work for a long time will find READING THE WAVES especially rewarding, as they observe a writer growing into her own maturity in a spirit of acceptance without resignation."

“I stare at his back, his slightly awkward gait, the walk of a not-yet teen. A shock wave runs up my body from my vagina to my clavicle. Someday soon he is going to be walking away from us into his own life. Or, the walk away from us has already begun, just now. My son is a portal. He is stepping through into self. In some ways, I just want to lie down and die, sleep with the sleepers.”

This passage in some ways evokes much of what Yuknavitch is doing in READING THE WAVES. Wonder is twinned with despair; the body is intimately, viscerally entwined with both emotion and intellect; and death is never far away.

Yuknavitch's project in the book is gestured at by the four brilliant writers --- Jeanette Winterson, Clarice Lispector, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf --- whose words form the book's epigraphs. In THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER, Yuknavitch was writing about “embodied memory,” how “memory has no linear chronology or fixed note in time and space.” Now, years later, she acknowledges that our memories, our life stories, do take on lives both within and outside our bodies. If we pay attention, we can read them like actual stories.

“What if we could read our own past, our memories, even our bodies, as if they too were books open to endless interpretation? Endlessly generating and re-forming and showing us new insights?... Could I read my own past the way I read the books I love, with the same compassion, irritation, resistance, desire, playful transgression, erotics, joy, curiosity, and wonder that I bring to the books I love?”

Yuknavitch, of course, is not just a reader --- though her memoir is brimming with the words and inspiration of other authors --- she's also a writer. So when she approaches her own memories like a book, she's not just interpreting them; she’s narrating them and inviting us along for the ride. The memoir's structure is anchored by her reckoning with the death of her former lover, and her attempts to narrate his life and death outside of the very different narratives created by the police report of his death and the too-tidy, nearly generic obituary written by his family. But it also touches on many other traumas, including the violent death of her beloved older cousin and the tragic loss of her infant daughter, her own legacy of abuse, and the ways in which she has fought her way back to health, strength and joy through writing, art and sex.

Readers who have been following Yuknavitch's work for a long time will find READING THE WAVES especially rewarding, as they observe a writer growing into her own maturity in a spirit of acceptance without resignation. Newcomers also have much to savor here. They can use this powerful work as a jumping-off point into Yuknavitch's other writings, or simply be inspired by the list of challenges with which she closes the book, including: “You are never the same person twice; your story is ever-being. You are constantly changing, and that is everything.”