Reading the Waves: A Memoir

Novelist Yuknavitch (Thrust) approaches her past “not as facts, but as fictions” in this stunning, genre-bending self-portrait. Drawing inspiration from Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison, Yuknavitch eschews the conventions of traditional memoir to explore the idea that “bodies are carriers of experiences” in lyrical, short story–like chapters. The nonchronological vignettes highlight pivot points in Yuknavitch’s life, including the murder of an older cousin when she was a child, and her own sexual assault, which drove Yuknavitch to “spend my life creating literature as resistance” since “the murdered woman is everywhere in art and life.” Other anecdotes—of Yuknavitch swallowing pennies, rocks, and seeds as an adolescent, and of the staggering pain she felt when her daughter died—propel her on a journey away from numbness and toward an awareness that language offers outlets to “explore the disruptions, eruptions, many paths [and] rewordings we might invent” to lighten the burden of the past. With a fiercely feminist outlook and moody, evocative prose that never tilts into preciousness, Yuknavitch delivers a gorgeous ode to the grunt work of self-discovery. It’s a major achievement. Agent: Rayhané Sanders, Massie & McQuilkin Literary Agents. (Feb.)