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Memoirs have at their heart a content that happened to someone in real life. Is that what you are itching at in your question, so that if you are a reviewer or you are writing a critique you might feel as if you are stepping on someone's actual face?

Lidia Yuknavitch

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Lidia Yuknavitch
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: June 18
Author
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Feels
Content
Reviewer
Real
Question
Itching
Writing
Happened
Memoirs
Heart
Face
Reviewers
Life
Faces
Stepping
Someone
Critique
Might
Memoir
Feel
Actual

More quotes by Lidia Yuknavitch

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I don't have much interest in writing if there are not opportunities to crack open the inherited forms. The writing I love to read most does this as well. I'm a form junkie.
Lidia Yuknavitch
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As far as being territorial about one's own life, that's a mistake for ANY writer. All writers everywhere, in every genre, are drawing from their life and the lives of those around them for material. Memoirs just make transparent and even amplify that activity.
Lidia Yuknavitch
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The maternal impulse in animals to protect their young - that kind of instinct and subsequent violence is quite beautiful. Mythic even.
Lidia Yuknavitch
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Poetry, for example, goes so deeply into the space between corporeal affect and deep emotion (even primal in some cases) that, as Emily Dickinson said, it can blow the top of your head off. Poetic language is sometimes misunderstood as abstract when in reality, it's precise - precisely the language of emotions and the body.
Lidia Yuknavitch
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Your life doesn’t happen in any kind of order. Events don’t have cause and effect relationships the way you wish they did. It’s all a series of fragments and repetitions and pattern formations. Language and water have this in common.
Lidia Yuknavitch
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Though I consider The Chronology of Water to be an anti-memoir for very precise reasons, it is an art form, and thus as open to critique as any other art form. Memoir has a form, formal strategies, issues of composition and craft, style, structure, all the elements of fiction or nonfiction or painting or music or what have you.
Lidia Yuknavitch
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The rocks. They carry the chronology of water. All things simultaneously living and dead in your hands.
Lidia Yuknavitch
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I don't have any problem understanding why people flunk out of college or quit their jobs or cheat on each other or break the law or spray-paint walls. A little bit outside of things is where some people feel each other. We do it to replace the frame of family. We do it to erase and remake our origins in their own images. To say, I too was here.
Lidia Yuknavitch
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Have endless patterns and repetitions accompanying your thoughtlessness, as if to say let go of that other more linear story, with its beginning, middle, and end, with its transcendent end, let go, we are the poem, we have come miles of life, we have survived this far to tell you, go on, go on.
Lidia Yuknavitch
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Only when I make movements away from the tribe of indie art and literature. Maybe that's something important for me to keep thinking about. What you gain, what you lose, why and how. Maybe the edge of the page is the place for me. Maybe that's OK.
Lidia Yuknavitch
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I've noticed over the past years of my writerly life that women writers in particular are discouraged in cleverly disguised forms from including the intellectual in their creative material way more than you would believe.
Lidia Yuknavitch
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If I hadn't spent a big chunk of time in academia I might not have the depth of consciousness I do about ideas like that. I might think, for instance, that Freud was no big deal in terms of the shape of social organization then or now. I might think that the discourses of politics and law are real and stable and fair.
Lidia Yuknavitch
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Words carry oceans on their small backs.
Lidia Yuknavitch
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I just want my stories to be mine.
Lidia Yuknavitch
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Birth is of course violent. Menstruation is violent. Trust me, if men's penises opened up once a month and shot blood, we'd be hearing about the violence of it.
Lidia Yuknavitch
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I drop to the curb like childhood leaving a body.
Lidia Yuknavitch
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We live through sound and light—through our technologies.
Lidia Yuknavitch
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The memoir as a somewhat indistinct form is absolutely true. So many of the memoirs I've read, and the ones I have gravitated toward most, somehow upend what I expect from memoir and the project seems greater than just the exposition of a life.
Lidia Yuknavitch
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Make up stories until you find one you can live with.
Lidia Yuknavitch
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In water, like in books—you can leave your life.
Lidia Yuknavitch