Nobody fucking writes about trauma like Lidia Yuknavich. Mainly due to the fact that she eschews the word trauma and any framework we’ve used to describe it in favor of situating you in her body at the moments of her deepest suffering. Placing a stone in her mouth after her daughter’s stillbirth. Squatting to pee on the floor of a grocery store in the interminable mist of the pain. The frozen terror in her child body in response to her father’s sexual abuse. Riding a bike shoved downhill, his body huge like a demigod at her back.
It’s something quietly earth shattering when someone so wounded can find their way back to their body. Whether it’s the motel threesome by the ocean or the pussy spanking she gets from an older Domme or the deep waters of love she floats on with her husband and father of her son, she brings us into the pool as the waves of pleasure hit even harder than the ripples of the past. Reconciling that circle of grief and regret and love and cumming is where her writing meets us. We float on it too.
A passage that jumped out at me and encircled my heart is one where she puts into words what it is like to fall in love with a man as a sexually fluid woman who has so much father trauma: