“Beyond the Pages: Lidia Yuknavitch Reveals the Hidden Depths of ‘Reading the Waves'”
LL: In the section titled “Daughter,” you mention how for the first time in your life you truly miss your mother. Mothers are complex as hell. Our relationships with our mothers are complex as hell, even if they are dead. Mine is dead. Yours is dead. But how they live somewhere in our bodies and our dreams and our gut.
LY: At this point I experience the word “mother” a little bit like I experience the word “water.” The word mother has opened up into thousands of meanings after writing this book. The word mother has prismed into waves and particles. So whatever my mother was or wasn’t, whatever our love for each other was or wasn’t, the word has been liberated back out into the ocean or the cosmos to shapeshift meanings where needed. And my own motherhood is undergoing some kind of transformation as well; some form of loosening and becoming sediment and array is happening, because I am going to be 62 this summer. I can feel it. I don’t want to miss this whatever-it-is. I want to notice. Experience. Maybe this is how I love my mother — recognizing I am part of everything around me, human but especially non-human, as I am approaching my return to existence.
