Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This book has an exceptional amount of hype surrounding it. Having supposedly created a new category labeled "Anti-Memoir," I had some reasonably high expectations for this work. If you take any kind of creative writing classes, or study literature at the college level you will already be familiar with the push toward legitimizing creative non-fiction memoirs. On a fundamental level I'm not really interested in that debate. If someone's writing can hold my attention, entertain, and get me to engage with their text, I'm on board. Fiction, poetry, non-fiction, or mix genre. Good writing stands on its own and transcends any genre. However, the prose in "The Chronology of Water" is premeditated and forced. It reads like any other self-obsessed MFA non-fiction essay awaiting rejection in a lit mag slush pile. It's another example of how this genre is failing to launch. On a line level the prose is highly pretentious and indulges in narcissistic self-aware faux avant-garde technique applied ad naseum. I'm all for a poignant fragment, but technique applied without reason or restraint renders the attempts into literary gimmicks (e.g. artsy-fartsy nonsense). At the line-level the book will drive an attentive reader bonkers. Anyone foreign to the MFA artsy-fartsy culture will just think there are a lot of typos and bad editing. Which perhaps could be forgiven if the substance were weighty enough. Frankly, I feel that Yuknavitch is an unreliable narrator of her own life. I certainly don't believe in the truth of this memoir part and parcel. I believe only in Yuknavitch's desire to shock and awe the reader at any cost. All the up-close and personal details feel pimped and slimy. The events are not so much exposed and explored as they are posed and marketed. In the age of internet porn, no one has the luxury of being a prude anymore. Yuknavitch's silly sex details read like teen swaggering, which would be condemned as excessive if this were written by a male, but Yunavitch insists it is all sexy and empowering because she's a woman. The former bad-girl turned house kitten Ph.D. recounts what a naughty slut she once was. Sexual? Yes. Sexy? Not even close. Read any of the prurient passages and transpose the gender and then ask yourself if you'd read the same thing from a male. I'd then invite you to ask yourself if parroting a braggart legacy of misogyny is really empowering to anyone, male or female. And you can offer the rebuttal "Oh but it's a memoir, she's just recounting her life." But I don't buy it, and that comes down to a question of credibility. Yuknavitch guts her own credibility at every turn. Non-fiction requires a fundamental devotion to the truth and Yuknavitch's tendency toward self-aggrandizing hyperbole left me in disbelief. It's hard to not judge when reading a memoir, especially one that is so intent on not asking for your permission or forgiveness. I'm not really interested in condemning Yuknavitch. I don't want to be anyone's moral nanny. I believe women can be just as narcissistically self-destructive as any man. What I condemn is the boredom of it all. How does Yuknavitch afford her Rock `n Roll lifestyle? At the expense of the safety, sobriety, and sanity of everyone around her and after ruining other people's lives, she publishes an unabashed memoir of her exploits. Alcoholism, narcissism, and sex-addiction served straight with no chaser of complexity quickly becomes an easily dismissed, salaciously boring read. In the last few essays Yuknavitch seems to sense this and goes all mushy, which I didn't find redemptive, believable, or satisfying either. It reads more like selling out. The transformation from hard-edged selfish addict to deep-thinking literary snob is not shown, it's told - and again, I just don't believe it. Yuknavitch doesn't pick herself up off the floor and straighten out her own life. No, she looks into the eyes of her married lover and when he tells her he wants her to have his baby - Whoomp There It Is! - She's done been saved by a man's redemptive love (insert Disney desperate lack-of-agency female chorus here). At every turn I feel the authenticity of experience is withheld, my trust as a reader trampled, and my time wasted. I once heard a tragedy defined as a story where characters come close to transcending circumstances but fail to grow and live up to their potential. In that sense, this memoir, its prose and its "protagonist" are a real tragedy. This has that current buzz on it, where a lot of people are discussing the book - so by all means read it if you want to participate in that dialog, but don't believe the hype.