So much of memory is recollecting pieces. And that’s what writing is — drawing from language to recollect and shape pieces of things. I am absolutely more able to reveal emotional truths about myself or anything inside fiction writing. The imaginative realm makes the most “sense” to me in my life — it’s everything else in life that is difficult. But I did find something in the course of writing this non-fiction book that truly amazed me. I could address my mother and father as characters from parts of their lives that did not include me. I could imagine a prestory to them. I could feel compassion for them. And I can thank them for this life I have, as bittersweet a process as that is to move through.
Earlier you mentioned the metaphor of collecting rocks. One of my favorite chapters, “Metaphor,” describes this as follows: “The rocks. They carry the chronology of water. All things simultaneously living and dead in your hands.” Here also is your title. What does the chronology of water mean to you?
Yes, this title came to me long ago-when I was 26! Wait, was I ever 26? Man that seems like epochs ago. I was in a creative writing workshop with the wonderful Diana Abu-Jaber. My daughter had just died, and I was a mess-raging, grieving, self-destructing. But I did manage to make it into that creative writing classroom. I wrote a crazy short story made from seemingly random fragments. Diana looked at the rush of fragments and said Lidia, they all have something in common. Because I was a knownothing, I said, what? Water, she said. She also said, I think this is a book. I think it’s the story of your life, maybe.
But at that time I was busy. Busy raging, grieving, fucking up.
Later I pulled the story back out and looked at it. You know what? She was right. And I thought, if this is the story of my life, no wonder it’s in fragments. It’s got a messed up chronology because that’s how I feel about life-it’s not linear. It moves in fits and starts, doubles back, repeats or extends an image. I thought if my life has a chronology, it’s the chronology of water — the way water carved the earth, the way water carries us into the world, the way we are made of water, the way water retreats or comes. I had, in other words, with her help, found my central metaphor.
That story was eventually published in The Northwest Review, and as you know, all these years later, has become the spine and bones of this book.
In my house there are many rocks. What I love about rocks that you find in rivers or at the ocean’s shore is that they are the sediment of all life on the planet continuously destroyed and remade. When you hold a rock in your hand you are holding everything in existence, even space dust, and it’s traveled oceans to get to you. So fragile and yet solid — made from pieces of things — like we are.
Writing restored your personal narrative that was not allowed in your father’s house while you were growing up. “My voice, she was coming. Something about my father’s house. Something about alone and water.” Does writing provide the same essential to Lidia the adult? Are the reasons you wrote then and now different?
Many people will know what I mean when I say that I can’t seem to live without the process of making art. I mean I literally fall apart or go to shit when I’m not making something, I can’t find the balance in my life or the center, I’m simply less of a person. Lost. Or worse. It feels like writing is the only thing I am any good at, but that probably isn’t entirely true. What I mean when I say that writing is the only thing I am good at is that it is the place where I feel most present, most worth a crap, most able to give something useful.
But there is another thing about writing that may or may not be something I should tell people-ha. I do know that when I’m inside writing I don’t want to be anywhere else. It’s like being inside a song or a painting. Wouldn’t it be something to be able to inhabit art? It’s a little frightening though — to think about staying there — not coming out. Perhaps that is a psychosis edge. I have a painter friend who talks this way about wanting to stay inside the painting — trusting images and color and composition more than people — I definitely feel that way too. We joke about not coming out sometimes.
There are reasons to come out. My son, my family. Love. Animals, the ocean.
Too, it strikes me that in America we don’t much have a “sacred” place or role for the isolate artist any longer. Everything has been sucked up into marketing and celebrity and the almighty commodity — so if you are a writer, you are meant to sell something. If it sells, it has worth. But in my heart of hearts I just want to sneak individual books into the pockets of sad people. Or stuff pews with them! Because writing gave me a place to go and be and grow when I wanted to give up. And I’d like to jam my foot in the doorway so that others might find this place too. And yes, that is still true. Maybe more than ever.
Swimming offered you water, respite from home, your life there. During your senior year of high school at the State Championships your relay team scored the best time in the nation. “Then Jimmy Carter took all little girl dreams of swimmer glory away from our bodies with a boycott-Randy’s famous pool full of winners included- anyway. There was no world left to belong to. Not athlete, not daughter.” Later you accepted a scholarship in Texas and once there left both the college and competitive swimming. Did the U.S. boycott of the Olympics have anything to do with this or affect your future relationship with the sport?
My sister and I have always had a little bit of a hard time distinguishing reality from fiction. We both escaped our childhood terrors in books and music and art, and those creative worlds were more real to us than the one that trapped inside my father’s house.
Something could be “true” one minute, say, Christmas morning with presents and a tree, and rendered “untrue” within the first twenty minutes of opening presents if my father’s rage got loose. Or you could get an “A” at school, and bring it home only to be shamed: “What, does that make you special?”
Once my sister crawled underneath her high school art lab table and refused to come home. Ever. I’d go to school or to swim team-my two great escapes — and be unable to tell reality from nonreality. At the pool, in the safety of water, alongside the beautiful bodies of almost women, was that reality? At school where teachers gave me books to read that forever took me to other worlds, wasn’t that real? Or was reality back at home, where even breathing meant shame?
Reality lost its hold on me by the time I was 10.
Very good swimmers spend their youth trying to swim to an endpoint like the Olympics. A tangible goal you are living for. Training for. Year after year. Something to give you self worth. Something to make you feel special. And if you were fast enough, maybe you could even swim all the way to a new life.
So when the Olympic Boycott happened, it proved what I already suspected was true. Reality could disappear in an instant — a man could take it from you forever.
I think the beginning of my deepest acts of self destruction often have something in common — a question that comes up in different forms over the course of a life-when the thing you are living for dies right in front of you, why go on? It’s a sadness that enters us all, just differently I suppose. But that Olympic boycott was one of my earliest moments of consciousness with regard to the mutability of reality in the world. Something called “politics” could steal your personal life. Just like something called “father” could. And I’d already grown up through the Nixon years and survived early Catholic upbringing … so even children understood to be cynical.