Reading the Waves

A Memoir

By: Lidia Yuknavitch

Length: 9 hrs

Publisher's summary

The frank and revealing memoir of a writer who draws from her own creativity to heal.

"I believe our bodies are carriers of experience," Lidia Yuknavitch writes in her provocative memoir Reading the Waves. "I mean to ask if there is a way to read my own past differently, using what I have learned from literature: how stories repeat and reverberate and release us from the tyranny of our mistakes, our traumas, and our confusions."

Drawing on her background—her father's abuse, her complicated dynamic with her disabled mother, the death of her child, her sexual relationships with men and women—and her creative life as an author and teacher, Yuknavitch has come to understand that by using the power of literature and storytelling to reframe her memories, she can loosen the bonds that have enslaved her emotional growth. Armed with this insight, she allows herself to look with the eye of an artist at the wounds she suffered and come to understand the transformational power this has to restore her soul.

By turns candid and lyrical, stoic and forgiving, blunt and evocative, Reading the Waves reframes memory to show how crucial this process can be to gaining a deeper understanding of ourselves.

©2025 Lidia Yuknavitch (P)2025 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“Reading the Waves is electrifying. In it, Lidia Yuknavitch interrogates memory, both as an act and a concept—remembering becomes a process of re-membering, of revivifying and reassembling a moment, a story, or a body. Yuknavitch invites us to dive deep into the waters of grief and imagination, love and violence, then guides us back up to the surface where we breathe a little freer and can see both the possibilities of the past and future horizons anew. Yuknavitch is a literary renegade, exploding the borders of genre and radically reimagining the stories we carry as acts of resistance.”—Suleika Jaouad, author of Between Two Kingdoms

“What makes us return to Yuknavitch again and again is her searing honesty, wide-open compassion, and sensual engagement with this earthly realm. Reading the Waves is brilliant storytelling by one of our most adventurous creatives. It is an investigation into how our stories must shift to accommodate each age, each generation, even as they remain mythically rooted in the ancient archetypal shapes of human transformation. This is a book you will return to again and again for the wild astuteness of its wisdom.”—Joy Harjo, 23rd U.S. Poet Laureate

“Yuknavitch is a lighthouse, strobing her insistent truth across any distance. I have learned so much from her about storytelling, survival, and the ways that tenderness and strength are siblings. I’ll read anything she writes.”—Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood