Lidia Yuknavitch
“For me, the body is a real place. It is a place you go to, a place you inhabit. It is the fundamental setting of every experience you have. And it is sometimes a place you leave in moments of fear or crisis or grief or depression or pain. I am working toward creating art that happens to a reader in their real body.”
“[A] quicksilver, expansive exploration of grief and hauntings.”
“Provocative and expansive. . . Joy, sorrow, rage, fear, guilt, lust, adoration — it’s all there in equal parts. The book empowers us to consider: When we look back at our pasts, how comfortable are we with seeing who we really were and embracing that version of ourself, however flawed? Perhaps more important, how do we shed the parts of us we no longer find useful to become something new?”
“At turns emotional and darkly hilarious … this memoir is rich ground and a magnificent narrative about memory, trauma, and healing. Fans of genre-bending or lyrical memoir will enjoy this multilayered meditation leveraging Yuknavitch’s creativity, thoughtfulness, and sense of wonder.”
“[The] most mind-blowing book about America I’ve ever inhaled. . . . I read Thrust in a state of flustered fascination and finished longing to dream it again.”
“Yuknavitch is interested in the way the bodies of immigrants, refugees, and marginalized people have been the fodder used to keep the American project going—and her humane love for those same bodies shines. . . . Complex, ambitious, and unafraid to earnestly love—and critique—America and its most dearly held principles.”
“The powers of her prose [are] on full, incandescent display. . . . The damaged beauty of these misfits keeps the reader leaning in.”
“A beautifully written field guide to being weird.”
“Brilliant and incendiary.”
“Lidia Yuknavitch’ s explosive new novel…is fierce in its vision, with captivating prose that carries its own momentum. Yuknavitch has created a reading experience that is uncomfortable and dazzling, with a vital intensity that grabs at the gutstrings.”
“Dora is too much for Sigmund Freud but she’s just right for us – raunchy, sharp and so funny it hurts.”
“This isn’t a memoir ‘about’ addiction, abuse, or love: it’s a triumphantly unrelenting look at a life buoyed by the power of the written word.”
Lydia Yuknavitch is a highly acclaimed, nationally bestselling author of memoir, fiction, and nonfiction. Her most recent book is the memoir Reading the Waves (Riverhead, 2025), praised by Booklist as “emotional and darkly hilarious,” and as "electrifying" by Suleika Jaouad. Her other books include the novel Thrust (Riverhead, 2022), named a best book of the year by The Washington Post, Verge: Stories (Riverhead, 2020), a finalist for the Story Prize, The Misfits Manifesto (TED Books, 2017), a book based on her widely viewed TED Talk, The Book of Joan (Harper, 2017), a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, national bestseller The Small Backs of Children (Harper, 2015), Dora: A Head Case (Hawthorne Books, 2012), the groundbreaking memoir The Chronology of Water (Hawthorne Books, 2011), a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for creative nonfiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Award Reader's Choice, and a critical book on war and narrative, Allegories Of Violence (Routledge, 2001).
Her writing has appeared in many publications including Guernica Magazine, Ms., The Iowa Review, Zyzzyva, Another Chicago Magazine, The Sun, Exquisite Corpse, TANK, and in the anthologies Life As We Show It (City Lights), Wreckage of Reason (Spuytin Duyvil), Forms at War (FC2), Feminaissance (Les Figues Press), and Representing Bisexualities (SUNY), as well as online at The Rumpus.
In an interview with The Paris Review, she was asked about the influence of writers like Kathy Acker and Dennis Cooper,, who Yuknavitch has referred to as “the underbelly of literature,” on her own work: “So many of the writers I admire have dared to dive over the edge into what might reasonably be seen as “troubled waters.” When I read the work of Acker and Cooper and many many others, I feel like the art happens to me inside my body. I think that, like Sarraute, they demonstrated that it was possible to break all the rules I had believed existed in literature. They showed me that writing could be violent and physical and polymorphous and messy and still qualify as “literary,” still be transcendent. That there are different narratives available.”
Yuknavitch founded the workshop series Corporeal Writing in Portland Oregon, where she teaches both in person and online. She received her doctorate in Literature from the University of Oregon. She is a very good swimmer.
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© Miles Mingo
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