Dora: A Headcase (2 page)

 

PORTLAND MONTHLY

 

I fucking loved this book and I strongly encourage anyone reading this to buy the book immediately and then keep it beneath your pillow or shove it down your pants or crack open your rib cage and hold the book next to your heart. It is really that beautiful and brilliant and any number of superlatives I will spare you from for the sake of decorum.

 

HTMLGIANT

 

Portland writer Lidia Yuknavitch seeks out conventions in life and art, then tears them down, in her exhaustively compelling memoir,
The Chronology of Water
, a book that is as much the making of a singular artistic voice as it is a document of a life that could have yielded a dozen memoirs.

 

EUGENE MAGAZINE

 

The Chronology of Water
is the kind of book that makes you want to hug it to your heart, kiss its cover, run your fingertips over the edge of each page …Yuknavitch has this uncanny ability of making me feel like she’s reaching out of the book and past my skin and into my ribcage and then there’s her fist around my heart, synchronizing my pulse with the pace of her prose …
The Chronology of Water
is a vital book – a book that will be, as Kafka famously demanded, the axe for the frozen sea within you.

 

PANK MAGAZINE

 

Lidia Yuknavitch is an inspiring woman. Her story brought me to tears several times. The abuse she survived, ingested, and spit out in order to transform herself into the swan that she is today…was indeed a life-changing upbringing. Her story is haunting, touching, and heartbreaking.

 

THE NERVOUS BREAKDOWN

 

The most compelling thing about this story is not its raw palpability, but rather the pure hope and unabashed joy infused in its last chapters.
Chronology
is about the resiliency of the human heart and its ability to piece itself back together, over and over.

 

PORTLAND WOMAN MAGAZINE

 

It’s rather a relief that this is not an addiction memoir or a book about too much sex, although there’s lots of great randy sex on these pages.
The Chronology of Water
is simply an unapologetic story about life.

 

THE COLLAGIST

 

Speaking of water … as its title suggests, Lidia Yuknavitch’s fierce new memoir,
The Chronology of Water
(blurbed by Shields, among several eminent authors) takes place entirely off-shore, metaphorically speaking. Nothing about her life has followed the map. Yuknavitch gives new, rich meaning to the by-now-familiar idea of a fluid sexuality.

 

PASTE MAGAZINE

 

I cannot fathom of a list of the ten best books of the year that does not include Lidia Yuknavitch’s
The Chronology of Water
… one of the most stunning books I’ve ever read and undoubtedly the best book I read in 2011.

 

THE RUMPUS

 

I’m not sure I’ve ever had such a powerful, complex reaction to a book.
The Chronology of Water
is astonishingly beautiful, and, as a writer, Yuknavitch is a force. Her writing hits you, hard. It rocks you. She knocked me over with passages so brilliant, so true, I had to reread them over and over until I could bear to let them go in order to move on to the next paragraph.

 

POWELL’S BOOKS

 

… brave and breathless memoir … vivid storytelling.

 

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

This book is for every teen who ever got treated like something was wrong with them, when really they were opening the portal for all of us. I made this for you. Also, you are right. The adult world is a Fellini movie.

LEAVE IT TO LIDIA YUKNAVITCH TO TAKE US ALL TO THE next level.

It wasn’t that many years ago that rich people could get gussied up, wearing pearls and silver-buckled shoes, coats trimmed in ermine, diamond tiaras and velvet gloves and thus attired trot through lunatic asylums to watch the resident nutcases masturbate and eat feces. Such a bother, for the rich sane people, all that trotting, I mean. Nowadays, we simply recline on the sofa at home, sipping from our goblets of pinot noir. True, we’re forced to peel our own jumbo shrimp, but that’s the worst of it. Otherwise, we ogle the usual line-up of basket cases: There’s the compulsive hoarder, buried in heaps of squalid garbage and poo-sodden adult diapers. There’s the staggering, puke-glazed drunk or pill popper. There’s the always-entertaining sexual compulsive – that constantly jerking off, pussy paddling freak show. And there’s the obese food-gobbling blimp.

The biggest difference between our modern loony bin slumming and the more ancient practice is that these days we don’t have to smell the mess. It’s still an exhibition, but today we can observe it from the comfort of our living rooms. Yes, because now the crazies are televised. It’s “crises as commodity,” or – as I like to call it – “Thera-tainment.” Oh, the titles of the programs change, but the die is cast. The shows are called
Intervention
or
Hoarders
or
Too Fat for Fifteen
or
Bad Sex
. And the people appearing on them seem to do so because they have no private
options left. Here are the same folks who’d be condemned to the public loony bin or the workhouse of an earlier century. The indigent town drunks or village idiots or neighborhood dirty old men.

Each television show is structured in three dramatic acts. In the first, we witness the vibrant, promising child. There are always baby pictures dredged up, primary school portraits of smiling kids wearing braces on their teeth. In the second act we see what this innocent tyke has become: a home-bound recluse, a bloated pig, a drooling junky, or a skulking porn addict. And in the third act the object of our voyeuristic gaze is offered stern redemption. In fact the entire show is marketed as a redemptive process. We’re only here to help. It’s with a sincere mask of empathy that we look down on these poor, troubled souls. In this final act, mental health professionals enter to teach coping skills and offer alternative methods of impulse control. It would all be so healthy and productive … except for the fact that the junkies are wired with microphones; everyone’s lower back has the square, tell-tale bulge of a mic pack hidden under his or her clothes. The fatties are gorging on fried chicken, sweating under bright camera lights. And always, unseen, is a crew of people staging every shot.

Worth mentioning here is how all this fuss undermines our concept of aberrant, self-destructive behavior as an illness. Watching
Intervention
or
Hoarders
the viewer can’t help but wonder if it’s not all a performance: fake symptoms met with fake therapy and resulting in a fake recovery. Here’s apparent proof that the mentally disturbed are, as we’ve always suspected, simply pretending in order to get more attention.

But, golly gee whiz, it’s all so … captivating. Really, there but for the grace of God go you and me. Without health insurance, that would be us parading our dirty psychiatric laundry to Dr. Phil and Dr. Laura, giving good Thera-tainment value in exchange for their scant advice. Plus a miserly ration of their tough love.

Most often the object’s ultimate fate is revealed with a single-card
message. It’s a sentence or two presented in “reverse” type, white letters on a field of absolute black. Either the stricken sinner accepts the new teaching or they reject it. They live or die. Black or white. All or nothing. And most weeks, the fatty or junky or perv is saved. Hallelujah. But every so often … the meth-tooting zombie or ranting shut-in dies in the noxious bed of his or her own making.

It always was a kind of slumming: the sane descending to observe the insane, people with money and power staring at those without. It’s best not to mention the implied moral lessons about gluttony, lust, greed, and sloth pushed to their extreme, albeit so-deserved, fates. But it does suggest the Saved laying pitying eyes upon the Damned. In the same way we currently trawl cable channels for these train wrecks, no doubt the angels of Heaven will enjoy their eternity all the more because they’ll be granted the occasional stroll among those suffering in Hell.

What’s not to love? That’s Thera-tainment. It offers us a sense of superiority, comfort, catharsis. Each episode is less a melodrama than a cautionary tale or sermon. And the experts imported – the licensed clinical social workers, household organizers, personal trainers, dieticians, etc. – they’re nothing less than evangelical missionaries, these disciples of Freud and Jung and Skinner. On a side note, it’s ironic how the same institutions which confined the insane also protected them from such media exploitation. Remember the hue and cry over the Diana Arbus photos taken at Willowbrook? Where once only the rich could afford to pay the bribes or “donations” that gave them access to ogle, now everyone who can afford basic cable can enjoy the pathos.

So-called “reality television,” what started as merely observation (think of
An American Family
in the 1970s) and practical jokes (think of
Candid Camera
in the 1950s) was not about fixing people. Not at first. But now under the guise of empowerment, the scientific equivalent of a Billy Sunday tent revival, dozens of them, comes into our homes every week. So where do
we go from here? Now that we’ve recognized the profit and status motives of these doctors, trainers, bullies, what’s next?

Leave it to Lidia Yuknavitch to show us.

Turnabout is more than fair play; it’s healthy. Perhaps as the weak “ill” subjects are exploited for Thera-tainment, perhaps now they’ll redirect the public gaze back, onto their “healthy” would-be rescuers. The exhibitors will become the exhibition. Only Lidia Y could see where this zeitgeist was going. In
Dora
, she takes the most classic model of Thera-tainment, personal-crisis-as-content, and she re-imagines it wonderfully reversed.

Imagine if Pat and Bill and Lance Loud had covertly decided to counter-manipulate filmmaker Craig Gilbert and public television. It’s easy to see how that would’ve reunited their unhappy family. Or, imagine if some poor sucker on a New York City sidewalk had slammed a cream pie into the smirking face of Allen Funt. That, that would be empowerment. An observed subject secretly, masterfully controlling the observer, that would demonstrate healthy self-actualization. As usual, Lidia Y is running miles ahead of the popular culture. We can’t say she hasn’t warned us.

The world of
Dora
is not just possible, it’s inevitable. It’s revenge as the ultimate therapy.

 

– CHUCK PALAHNIUK

Since eels do not keep diaries, the only way to determine gender was to cut and slice, but in vain, all the eels which I cut open were of the fairer sex.

 

SIGMUND FREUD

 

It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.

 

VIRGINIA WOOLF

 

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.

 

VIRGINIA WOOLF

MOTHER IS CLEANING THE SPOONS AGAIN. FROM WHERE I sit in the kitchen, I can see the reflection of her trippy-looking head: bulbous skull, stretched down mouth, eyes that scoop away at the rest of her face. A droop-faced woman. Jeeeez. Just look at her. She’s rubbing the holy crap out of those spoons. Poor, silvery utensils.

That’s what it felt like to be her kid, too.

I can see the inside out of this city from our lame kitchen window. Everything gray going to blue to black. Seattle streets running for all they are worth. Puny pedestrians. Sheets of rain. I can see the Space Needle. Possibly the dumbest thing ever. Rain life makes the scene out the high-rise condo seem like you are in a dream. I put my hand on the window and watch fog surround my fingers. I take my hand away. There I am. A trace. See-through girl. In a pink terry robe and two-day-old underwear. I want a cigarette.

 

MOTHER. I SIGH. She will rub the spoons until she wipes herself clean.

I rub my eyes. My face feels smeared.

You know what? Seventeen is no place to be. You want to get out, you want to shake off a self like old dead skin. You want to take how things are and chuck it like a rock. You pierce your face or you tattoo your skin – anything to feel something beyond the numb of home. You invent clothes other people think are
garbage. You get high. You meddle with sexuality. You stuff your ears with ear buds blasting music so loud it’s beyond hearing, it’s just the throb and heat and slam and pound and scream of bodies on the edge of adult. You text your head off. You guerilla film. We live through sound and light – through our technologies. With our parents’ zombie life dope arsenal at our fingertips.

I’m not a criminal.

I’m just a daughter. I’m not sick. I.

Just.

Need.

Out.

I walk into the living room. This room always reminds me of Mr. K. It even smells a little like him. When he first came on to me, Mr. K., the friend of my father’s, he had a butterknife in his hand. Who knows why a butterknife. He just did. Just me and him in the living room. Just rain whispering like nuns against the pressure of the walls and windows. He had this butterknife in his hand, and he crossed the carpet to me. He trembled. He put his hand on my hip, then he put his other hand near my collarbone. I had a Pixies T-shirt on with safety pins decorating the neckline. He leaned in and sort of suck nibbled my neck and he whimpered. He smelled like Old Spice and Altoids.

It was so retro. Like something out of a Lon Chaney movie. It should have been in black and white with dramatic and creepy music in the background. I’d have YouTubed it. What the fuck did he think he was doing? I pulled out my pocketknife. I flipped open the blade. He took a step back, thinking it might be for him, I guess. I held the little blade in the air between us. I menaced him. It cracked me up. Then I drew the blade to my own collarbone above the safety pins and Pixies to the very place he had trembled and whimpered. I held his gaze in mine. Without even looking, I made a little smile on my skin. I could hear him swallow.