florunia's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
reflective
medium-paced
3.0
No nie podobała mi się po prostu, nie czytało mi się przyjemnie, uwierała mnie przez większość treści. I jak rozumiem skąd takie zachowanie w młodości, to nie potrafiłam się z nią utożsamić. Nie wiem czy to bardziej brak podobnych doświadczeń czy może jakiś niedobór mojej emapatii. To jest chyba mój ogólny problem z nonfiction - ja wolę czytać treści gdzie lubię bohaterów, a tu autorki polubić nie zdołałam.
Ale to też nie tak że tylko hejtuję, podobała mi się metafora(? jak nazwać ten zabieg?) z wodą. Nie przeszkadzała mi dosłowność czy wulgarność, niech wyraża się jak czuje! I mam nadzieję że to poczucie spełnienia które czuć na koniec już z nią zostanie.
Content Warnings
Minor: Grief, Sexual assault, Sexual content, Child abuse, and Miscarriage
alexorr's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
inspiring
fast-paced
5.0
this was absolutely breathtaking. one of those books where it's like the author has written it especially for me, i think about this all the time. very helene cixous' ecriture feminine
crimelessvictim's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
emilyb88's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
reflective
fast-paced
5.0
This book is captivating. I devoured it in one sitting, unable to detach. Her honesty is striking, and her writing is both beautiful and effective.
mkhasai's review against another edition
4.0
life is so so messy. she writes with the mess through the mess hating the mess loving the mess. at first i didn’t get her style bc i haven’t read anything like this, but once i accepted the mess, i sank into it, and she taught me how to swim in it. there is so much pain. how she survived is a miracle. everyone’s portion is different, but i didn’t know it could be this different. i wanted to hide from her pain but she made me bear witness to it. i understand some of my pain because of this book. yup yup yup. ouch. (extra points because i was a swimmer and i’m currently in the PNW haha)
cdlindwall's review against another edition
4.0
I'm torn.
This is Lidia's memoir of childhood, growth, and rebirth, and her language does it justice. She has a gift for words; it's undeniable. Her prose is lyrical, strong, and wildly creative. Some of my favorite writing takes words that don't belong, that create strange images, that twist a common phrase and make you think. She does that beautifully.
Like here:
My belly grew too big for my clothes. Too big for my bath. My bed. Too big for my house. My former me and all her puny dramas. Bigger and bigger. My belly grew.
And each night Andy would put his hands on the mound of me and whisper secrets to the little boyfish any narrative but his own. Sweet hidden life in the water of me - the best thing I had to give. And he would suck the milkworld of me and our lovemaking rose and became enormous with my body, with our broken rules broken codes broken law love, every night our bodies making a songstory bigger than the lives we came from. The more my belly grew the more love we made.
How gorgeous is that? Her language held her story afloat. Her elongated metaphors about swimming and water were executed perfectly. The skilled shifts in time, moving back and forth between non-linear vignettes and memories, were great. On the writing alone, this book would be one of my favorites. (I also loved the emphasis she put on shared womanhood, but that's a separate conversation)
But on the other hand, the entire story was bursting with ego. I couldn't stand Lidia. I couldn't stand her famous-writer name dropping. I couldn't stand her drugs and indulgent dumbassery, especially when she reveled in its rebelliousness and counter culture. Breaking into other people's houses and fucking on their floor doesn't make you less beige. It doesn't make you interesting, either. And having a fucked up childhood doesn't forgive spending all of your 20s driving down the freeway blisteringly drunk. She talked so much about being in this special club of "others," this group of intellectually superior artists who created and fucked and tripped and destroyed everything around them. She talked about her brilliant artist friends who made brilliant "wordhouses" and lit up the sky with their intellectual energy.
But I wasn't inspired by her artist's story. I was just annoyed at how self-impressed she was. I understood it was about being reborn from that person she was, but I couldn't get past the way she exalted that person, at least in a way. Her childhood story was unendingly tragic, but the story of her 20s and early 30s just made me want to look away.
I will say, the last quarter of the book she regained my heart. A lot of her wisdom from experience finally came through, and I felt a connection with her that I hadn't in the beginning. This, alongside the gorgeous way she writes, is why I gave this book four stars.
This is Lidia's memoir of childhood, growth, and rebirth, and her language does it justice. She has a gift for words; it's undeniable. Her prose is lyrical, strong, and wildly creative. Some of my favorite writing takes words that don't belong, that create strange images, that twist a common phrase and make you think. She does that beautifully.
Like here:
My belly grew too big for my clothes. Too big for my bath. My bed. Too big for my house. My former me and all her puny dramas. Bigger and bigger. My belly grew.
And each night Andy would put his hands on the mound of me and whisper secrets to the little boyfish any narrative but his own. Sweet hidden life in the water of me - the best thing I had to give. And he would suck the milkworld of me and our lovemaking rose and became enormous with my body, with our broken rules broken codes broken law love, every night our bodies making a songstory bigger than the lives we came from. The more my belly grew the more love we made.
How gorgeous is that? Her language held her story afloat. Her elongated metaphors about swimming and water were executed perfectly. The skilled shifts in time, moving back and forth between non-linear vignettes and memories, were great. On the writing alone, this book would be one of my favorites. (I also loved the emphasis she put on shared womanhood, but that's a separate conversation)
But on the other hand, the entire story was bursting with ego. I couldn't stand Lidia. I couldn't stand her famous-writer name dropping. I couldn't stand her drugs and indulgent dumbassery, especially when she reveled in its rebelliousness and counter culture. Breaking into other people's houses and fucking on their floor doesn't make you less beige. It doesn't make you interesting, either. And having a fucked up childhood doesn't forgive spending all of your 20s driving down the freeway blisteringly drunk. She talked so much about being in this special club of "others," this group of intellectually superior artists who created and fucked and tripped and destroyed everything around them. She talked about her brilliant artist friends who made brilliant "wordhouses" and lit up the sky with their intellectual energy.
But I wasn't inspired by her artist's story. I was just annoyed at how self-impressed she was. I understood it was about being reborn from that person she was, but I couldn't get past the way she exalted that person, at least in a way. Her childhood story was unendingly tragic, but the story of her 20s and early 30s just made me want to look away.
I will say, the last quarter of the book she regained my heart. A lot of her wisdom from experience finally came through, and I felt a connection with her that I hadn't in the beginning. This, alongside the gorgeous way she writes, is why I gave this book four stars.
emsemsems's review against another edition
3.0
‘And they are the stories of people who live at the margins of this thing we call culture, mostly fucking up, but some of us, aren’t we still here? For the ones who aren’t? I wonder, is it us that fucks up? Or the stories we’ve been given? It is not easy to leave one self and embrace another. Your freedoms will scar you. Maybe even kill you. Or one of your yous. It’s OK though. There are more. How many times do we die? Words, like selves, are worth it.’
First off, I’d like to clarify that this is very likely a shamefully unreliable review of the book. I couldn’t appreciate this properly probably due to a ‘reading a probably really amazing book at the wrong time’ kind of way. On the surface (or based on the blurbs), it really seems like a book that I’ll really like. And/but regardless of what I think of it now, I’ll still need/want to save it for a re-read on a different day. I might have missed out on some ‘good bits’ as I went mad skipping from one random chapter to another, reading it rather chaotically. I want to call the writing/writer ‘transgressive’ but as much as I have liked that word before, the more I think about it, the more I associate it with something silently derogatory – like when someone refers to another as ‘intellectual’ or ‘brave’, almost derisive, and surely unkind with a sense of ostracising that person. So while I can’t think of a more accurate term to describe it, I’ll go with unfiltered and hard-hitting. Unintentionally, I have been reading books back to back that touch on very similar ‘themes’ – about essentially life/death but in the perspective of women who wants to live and die their way – the way that feels ‘right’ to them. Notably: [b:Still Born|59115451|Still Born|Guadalupe Nettel|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1632934222l/59115451._SY75_.jpg|85976799] by Nettel that I absolutely adore.
‘It took me 10 years to emerge from the grief of a dead daughter. You have to forgive women like me. We don’t know any other way to do live than to throw our bodies at it. I was the kind of woman whose relationships were grenades and whose life became a series of car wrecks-anything to keep the girl I was and the girl I had – tiny daughter dolls – safe from this world. So yes I know how angry, or naïve, or self destructive, or messed up, or even deluded I sound weaving my way through these life stories at times. But beautiful things. Graceful things. Hopeful things can sometimes appear in dark places. Besides, I'm trying to tell you the “truth” of a woman like me.’
‘My sexuality is still very much in flux. But I would say that about us all. The limits we put on our own sexual development and exploration are partly cultural scripts and partly our own hopes and fears playing out skin stories. In other words, sexuality is always undergoing transition - just like our bodies and minds and souls and energies - always in flux.
So to be married might mean for some people that they shut down their sexual journey, or that they follow a wife/mother storyline, but I remain interested in explorations in between those things, at the edges, or beyond the regular orbits.I do still think that culturally speaking there is a very narrow bandwidth available for women in terms of sexual development. Wife, mother, lover, other…But if psycho-sexual development and corporeal development is lifelong, then I consider it part of my job in life to journey right up until the last. Even if I’m a dried up old raisin. Because I think bodies are about the coolest thing in … ever.’
I couldn’t shake off the essentially ‘gross’ feelings I felt towards to writer’s tendency to repeatedly romanticise alcoholism and drug addiction. It just didn’t sit well with me (but I may be biased considering that a few years ago, I had decided to stop consuming anything like that that would impact my overall ‘health’ negatively, and as a result – I have but inevitably adopted that annoying ‘quitter’s attitude’ towards these things). However, the tone and excessive and/but imprecise use of ‘fuck’ (and/or alike) was what annoyed me most. I craved for more precision and ‘structure’ in the writing (though I understand that sounds completely absurd/ ‘too much to ask for’ considering the ‘content’/ matters explored in the book). But having said that, I definitely enjoyed the book enough to want to keep my copy of it and leave it for another day. A shame I couldn’t thoroughly enjoy it this time.
‘You know Marguerite Duras once said “in childhood and the lives that follow, the mother represents madness. Our mothers remain the craziest people we’ve ever met. My mother remains the craziest person I ever met. But I mean something quite complex when I say that, maybe even profound. Up until the death of my daughter I would say that I maintained an antagonistic stance with my mother…I brought my rage and pain right up to the surface of her puffy with drink skin. She let me. Maybe she even drew it out of me. Though we never laid a hand on each other.’
‘I don’t believe in god. I don’t particularly believe in the cult of sin and redemption. But I do believe in energy. What I hold my father most responsible for is for not facing his own darkness - not acknowledging it as his. I think that is a flaw a great many of us struggle with. Like in The Tempest when Prospero says about Caliban, “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.” We all have to claim that which we have created. For me it’s a detachment that I have to watch out for every day of my life - else I become untethered from the ones I love, even from life. My father never acknowledged his capacity for cruelty. His uncontainable anger. His misplaced desires. Maybe I learned to forgive him from the language and poetics of Shakespeare. But forgiveness isn’t the best I have to give him. Even as a dead man, the best I have to give him is an acknowledgement that I came from him. And I did not kill myself. I am living beyond his life, his end and pulse.’
The Kathy Acker influence is very obvious in the book, but luckily for me, I do like Acker’s writing/work. Unsurprisingly, there is a chapter dedicated to Acker in the book. Even if I didn’t read it well enough this time, I definitely want to give it another go some time later though. And/but am actually very keen to watch the film adaptation of the book by Kristen Stewart (not sure when it’s released though). Contrary to popular views, I do think that there is a good amount of film adaptions that are ‘better’ than the book – such as [b:Jane Eyre|10210|Jane Eyre|Charlotte Brontë|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1557343311l/10210._SY75_.jpg|2977639] (specifically the one by Fukunaga), a bunch of Stephen King’s novels, and basically every telly/film adaption of Gillian Flynn’s novels (notably [b:Sharp Objects|18045891|Sharp Objects|Gillian Flynn|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1475695315l/18045891._SY75_.jpg|3801] and [b:Gone Girl|19288043|Gone Girl|Gillian Flynn|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1554086139l/19288043._SY75_.jpg|13306276]).
‘So here’s the deal. About family, you have to make it up. Seriously. I know amazing single women and their children who are families. Gay men and women with kids who are families. Bisexuals and transsexuals who family up all over the place. People who don’t have partners create families in everyone they touch. I know women and men from a multitude of sexual orientations without any children just doing their lives who create families that kick the can down the street. The heterosexual trinity is just one of many stories. If your marriage goes busto, make up a different you. If the family you came from sucked, make up a new one. Look at all the people there are to choose from. If the family you are in hurts, get on the bus. Like now.’
‘Language is a metaphor for experience. It’s as arbitrary as the mass of chaotic images we call memory–but we can put it into lines to narrativize over fear.’
iammmartina_'s review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
medium-paced
4.25
Content Warnings
Graphic: Addiction, Death, Violence, Domestic abuse, Drug abuse, Drug use, Alcoholism, Sexual content, Alcohol, Physical abuse, Child abuse, Child death, and Emotional abuse
Moderate: Vomit, Pregnancy, and Car accident
Minor: Abortion, Grief, Death of parent, Miscarriage, Outing, Terminal illness, and Cancer