September 2022, in a letter to my PNCA mentor, Alison C. Rollins:
I took The Chronology of Water with me to Oahu. There in my hotel room, it lulled me into a false sense of companionship with its acknowledgement: “If you have ever fucked up in your life, or if the great river of sadness that runs through all of us has touched you, then this book is for you.” With Lidia the swimmer, and then the ex-swimmer. With Lidia and her girlboy body. With Lidia the girl griever. With Lidia and her sense of grief and her sense of water. “To the people around me I just looked… more sad than anyone could bear. People don’t know how to be when grief enters a house. She came with me everywhere, like a daughter. No one was any good at being near us.”
Memoir. Creative nonfiction. Self-portraiture. Living as the work. All these things excite and inspire me. But the peril of this is taking things too personally. And if living is the work, and if you’re not living “enough” or “worthwhile,” if your life events aren’t “interesting” enough or prolific enough, does the work then fail? We’ve spoken of fetishizing the tragic when it comes to memoirs. Tragedy sells, wins book awards. Lidia can speak of her stillborn daughter, her abusive and incestuous father, her rise and fall relationships, but there are others. Her years of open rebellion, her sexual and drunken escapades, her hard drugs and near-death experiences, so young and so frequent – these passages so opposite and unlike myself. Me, with my “fucked up” life but apparently not that fucked up. Me, living and being the perfect chaste daughter-not-daughter with the good grades who never snuck out, never had to. Me, the ashamed daughter-not-daughter who was never anyone’s love or first love, rejected at every turn, turning further and further into my her-but not her-self. Me, who didn’t radically change in college, didn’t move away to “find” myself, didn’t have anything else to “find” inside. My antics did not exist. My persona wasn’t over-the-top. I couldn’t fuel such an engaging memoir with my nothingness and non-events. MEMO: All I have to offer, it seems, is my grief and my never-ending sadness – and who wants to read about endless sadness?
“This is not another story about addiction,” Lidia assures me, “No matter how marketable the addiction story has become, this is not that story. My life is more ordinary. More like… more like everyone else’s.” Me looking from the outside in, recognizing my life is so unlike everyone else’s: I see, have a nice day. (MEMO: Your life is pathetic. Your life-work isn’t enough. You’re not enough.) If best-selling New York Times author Nell Painter felt that way, what of me? If Olympic Gold Medalist Anthony Ervin felt that way, what of me? If they, and all their accomplishments I haven’t received and will never reach, felt that way, what of me? What’s worse than not good enough? What’s lower than that? (MEMO: Worthless. Worthless. Worthless.) I fucked up with my life but it’s not even “interesting” enough to write about. I’ll return to finish when it doesn't hurt in ways she didn't mean for it to.
November 2022
After a leave of absence, I waded back into The Chronology of Water – into Lidia’s great river of sadness, her life without order. I waded in with a life vest and a floatation ring and a wet suit, protecting myself from any unintended emotions her words might bring. Under me, with my body and my experiences and non-experiences, half of her life-work I had already read. But further down, the rest of her life-water still untouched.
I took off the life jacket the book had on – which was cumbersome and awkward in my hands whenever I read – revealing Lidia’s true cover underneath. I took off the book jacket-swim suit and revealed her breasts floating in the water. I unclothed her and was surprised. I unclothed her and readied myself to re-commit to her and her texts. I re-read the hundred-odd pages again, paused over the same places that gave me grief, and the life events that had me comparing and falling short, but they now passed over me like water. It was my mistake in the beginning to view her texts as a mirror. From Fran Lebowitz: “It’s an awful way to approach anything. It should take you away. A book isn't supposed to be a mirror. It's supposed to be a door!” I took off my life jacket and wet suit and waded into the waters with her – away. Both of us swimming and floating as equals, both of us and our different failures and failings, both of us and our same lack of belonging – mirroring, but not mirrors. Lidia reassuring me, “Sometimes a mind is just born late, coming through waves on a slower journey. You were never, in the end, alone.” And me asking, what about a body? What about my body? “There is no inside out but the body,” she answers; “Isn’t it a blessing, what becomes from inside the alone?”
Pages prior, Lidia describes her workshop with Ken Kesey – Oregon writing figurehead – and feeling like she didn’t belong. “I wasn’t an accomplished writer. I wasn’t an accomplished anything.” I didn’t and don’t know much about the man – only the cuckoo’s nest that I hold very dear. “My face got hot and the top of my head itched and all the others in the room looked like writers with special MFA badges while I felt like a human match. Like I might burst into a puny orange flame.” She continues:
In the fall of the year of Kesey I felt like an awkward jerkette most of the time. … I didn’t know how to feel close to a group. My only model of group interaction was my dreaded Oedipal family death house. And swim teams. You don’t talk to anyone when you are underwater.
… I did feel like some kind of academic authenticity police were going to bust in and cuff me and say you, you don’t belong here. You are not enrolled. You’re not even in the writing program. … But it didn’t happen. I just wrote things down on pieces of paper, like everyone else did.
In Oregon and in a writing program, I also felt like some type of academic authenticity police would take me away from the residency. You, you don’t belong here. You shouldn’t be enrolled. You’re not even a real writer. And yet that too didn’t happen. I just presented my pages like everyone else did, and sat through workshops and lectures like everyone else did, and did my freewrites like everyone else did. “No one ever questioned me, least of all Kesey. It was brilliantly incomprehensible to me. I loved it.” I was worried I wouldn’t belong, but amongst the graduating cohort and amongst the ex-pats from California in mine, I felt I did belong. Us and all of our various academic and artistic and writing traumas. Us all having the same fears, to various degrees.
Fears. Interviews. Kesey asks Lidia:
“What’s the best thing that’s ever happened to you in your life?”
I sat there like a lump trying to conjure up the best thing that had ever happened to me. We both already knew what the worst thing was. Nothing best had happened to me. Had it? I could only answer the worst. I looked out at the ocean.
…
“… What are you going to do next? … You know, in your life. What’s next?”
I didn’t have a plan. I had grief. I had rage.
The book doesn’t have to be a mirror, but I saw myself there. Not having a plan. Grief. Emptiness. “To the people around me I just looked… more sad than anyone could bear. People don’t know how to be when grief enters a house. She came with me everywhere, like a daughter. No one was any good at being near us.” Thick grief and endless sadness. Going through life like it’s thick and underwater. The best thing that’s happened to me? I too can only answer the worst. What am I going to do next? In my life, what’s next? After a set amount of time, I’ll have a degree. After that, I didn’t and don’t have a plan. Just grief. Before the pandemic and before my mother dying, I could answer those questions. The still-daughter self with art school on the horizon would tell you all the dreams she had – what she believed the art school would open up for her. The art fair self would tell you how happy they are and how they want to continue to grow. The just graduated self would lay out all their internships and plans for the near future already coming to fruition. What’s next now? Living Dead Girl.
Lidia swims out to me again: “it is possible to carry life and death in the same sentence. In the same body. It is possible to carry love and pain. In the water, this body I have come to slides through the wet with a history. What if there is hope in that.” She says this after the birth of her son, after her little dead girlfish miscarriage, and yet its ripples resonate in the life water. What if there is hope in that? I smile and nod and cry. She continues, in pages prior, yet now in the water. “Life – it’s not linear. It moves in fits and starts, doubles back, repeats or extends an image.” She moves forward and backward in and through her life in waves because it’s the chronology of water – “the way we are made of water, the way water retreats or comes.” Lidia continues, in pages prior, yet now in the water:
It is not easy to leave one self and embrace another. Your freedoms will scar you. Maybe even kill you. Or one of your yous. It’s OK though. There are more.
How many times do we die?
Words, like selves, are worth it.
The first time I waded into her life-waters, I didn’t think I deserved to be there – or anywhere. I didn’t deserve to make life-waters of my own. In my shame and sadness, I assumed no one would want to learn from them, or want to swim with me there in them. Too sad, too pathetic. Not enough events to populate the waters, I thought with my fogged over life goggles, only non-events and failures. Dried up puddle waters, my life as drought. Through hundreds of pages, through her past and present, Lidia shook her head:
The key is, make up shit.
Make up stories until you find one you can live with.
I learned it through writing.
Writing can be that.
Writing to bring the delicate dream to the tips of words, to kiss them, to rest your cheek on them, to open your mouth and breathe body to body to resuscitate a self.
This memoir isn’t a mirror, but I can relate to the words of a fellow swimmer – a body in water next to mine, her body who went before me. I didn’t believe her preface before, but I do now. “If you have ever fucked up in your life, or if the great river of sadness that runs through all of us has touched you, then this book is for you,” she said. Now, swimming with her, “Listen I can see you. If you are like me. You do not deserve most of what has happened or will. But there is something I can offer you. Whoever you are. Out there. As lonely as it gets, you are not alone. … This book? It’s for you. It’s water I made a path through. … Come in. The water will hold you.” Together in the water we swim as equals, mirroring, but not mirrors.