The personal is cyclical: Lidia Yuknavitch makes a triumphant return to memoir.

On this episode of Fully Booked, Lidia Yuknavitch joins us to discuss Reading the Waves (Riverhead, Feb. 4), a bold reconsideration of formative narratives by the author of the groundbreaking memoir The Chronology of Water.

Yuknavitch, who lives in Oregon, is a noted writer, teacher, and speaker. She is the nationally bestselling author of the novels Thrust, The Book of Joan, and The Small Backs of Children. She is the recipient of two Oregon Book Awards and has been a finalist for the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize and the PEN Center USA Award for creative nonfiction.

Here’s a bit from our review of Reading the Waves: “’What if we could read our past, our memories, even our bodies, as if they too were books open to endless interpretation?’ The point, she says, is to show readers, possibly aspiring writers themselves, how it is possible to ‘imagine a map’ that loosens the grip of sorrow. Among the experiences she mines are her relationship with her second husband, Devin…; an abusive relationship with a poet boyfriend; her troubled connections with her parents; and the stillbirth of a baby girl….She discusses the murders of her cousin Michelle and of a talented African American student she briefly worked with, saying she is ‘suspicious of conclusions’ about violence against women but has ‘chosen to spend [her] life creating a literature of resistance.’ While much of the material and the formal experiments she assays will be familiar to readers of the first memoir, the connection between the titles of the two supports the idea that this is a re-examination of old stories….Full of the messy, moving, in-your-face inspiration and storytelling for which Yuknavitch is beloved.”

Yuknavitch and I agree to structure our conversation around Reading the Waves’ four epigraphs—called “illumination guides” in the text—each by a powerful woman writer. First, we discuss how Jeanette Winterson’s words (“If you continually write and read yourself as fiction, you can change what's crushing you”) speak to the project of Reading the Waves. We discuss Clarice Lispector, shapeshifting, and the language of Reading the Waves. We tackle Gertrude Stein’s lecture on repetition and the experimental way Yuknavitch chose to write the story of her mother. Finally, we cover Virginia Woolf, the disparate pieces that came together to make Reading the Waves, book covers, and author photos.

Then editors Laura Simeon, John McMurtrie, Mahnaz Dar, and Laurie Muchnick share their top picks in books for the week.

EDITORS’ PICKS:

The Girl You Know by Elle Gonzalez Rose (Bloomsbury)

Max in the Land of Lies: A Tale of World War II by Adam Gidwitz (Dutton)

Mornings Without Mii by Mayumi Inaba, trans. by Ginny Tapley Takemori (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Knopf)

THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS:

Caraven of Specters by Carlos García Saúl

The Exiled by Jason Leigh Smith

Righteous Rebellion by James Hooker

Always Sam by Joan Tabb, illus. by John Albert

Joyous Longevity by Sieglinde Othmer

Fully Booked is produced by Cabel Adkins Audio and Megan Labrise.