Death, Life, and Resurrection

Yuknavitch's upends the idea of linear time as well as the typical processes of life--birth, life, and death--to tell a story about how she emerged from a state she equates with death to be reborn an artist. A memoir is typically a story about a life, but Lidia’s highly unconventional work is about her rebirth after feeling most of her life that she is dead, half dead, drowning, or on the edge of death. Although her story does not progress in linear time, the reader feels the forward movement of Lidia’s experience in an inverted process—from her “death” as a child sexually abused by her father, to her downward spiral in addiction after the death of her daughter, to a resuscitation and resurrection that comes through a new family and her art, to a fully realized life that honors her recreated self...