I wrote this essay as a sophomore for a class on Queer Life Writing, and I was given the opportunity to present the paper for the 2020 South Atlantic Modern Language Association Conference.
Misfit Time As Scriptotherapy
Lidia Yuknavitch identifies both in her TED talk (2016) and in the resulting book The Misfit’s Manifesto (2017) as a misfit. In her memoir The Chronology of Water (2010), Yuknavitch certainly operates on what I will label as misfit time, modeled after Judith Halberstam’s brilliant concept of queer time. Misfit time, like queer time, works in zig-zags and loops. For Yuknavitch, a bisexual woman who writes that she had sexual feelings from a young age, misfit time certainly has an important element of queerness. It is a space where, for Yuknavitch as a participant in The Chronology of Water, both reproductive and capitalist time are distorted. In addition to bringing in Halberstam’s insights, I would like to incorporate Suzette A. Hencke’s theory about the action of scriptotherapy in her work Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life Writing (1998). Hencke describes scriptotherapy as “the process of writing out and writing through traumatic experience in the mode of therapeutic reenactment” (xii). Hencke writes that by putting the reflective/reflexive consciousness in conversation with the participant, the writer is able to re-integrate different parts of their identity that have been fragmented by trauma (xv). I argue that misfit time offers Lidia in The Chronology of Water a particularly powerful way into healing.
On the surface level, the story of The Chronology of Water simply would not make sense if told on a linear timeline. Lidia has three abortions before the age of 21. She flunks out of school. She has a devastating miscarriage that leaves in its wake what she calls an “anti-child” (223). It takes her 11 years to break up with a boyfriend, and before she meets him, she says she hasn’t laughed since she was 10 (183). Wanting to die, she says, is “a bloodsong in your body that stays with you your entire life” (82). In reference to her miscarriage, Lidia asks, how can you be born dead? She asks (38). How can you “carry life and death in the same sentence?” (257). In a chapter of The Misfit’s Manifesto, “The Misfit’s Journey,” Yuknavitch challenges Joseph Campbell’s conception of the Hero’s Journey. Campbell outlined this journey as one that begins with a (Campbell envisioned this hero as able-bodied, and explicitly male, so I’ll use the same pronouns here to highlight this exclusion) hero who is called on a journey. The hero at first rejects the journey, but after a spiritual awakening of some sort, he finally accepts the call and starts on his journey. The writer throws several challenges the hero’s way, but with the help of different archetyped characters, he overcomes these challenges and emerges strong enough to fight the dragon, whatever form that dragon takes. Then he goes home a hero. In “The Misfit’s Journey,” Yuknavitch acknowledges that this story excludes women, who become supportive mothers, wives, and daughters, seductive sirens, or spoils of war that work as plot devices in the hero’s development. She also calls out that this timeline is an impossibly linear story that she and other misfits struggle to follow because of the time-warping effects of mental illness, suicidal ideation, homelessness, addiction, pregnancy loss, childhood sexual abuse, or any other number of traumas Yuknavitch faces in her memoir— many of which primarily affect women. However, Yuknavitch’s timeline only feels warped when held up to the ideal of Campbell’s linear Hero’s Journey. If we consider that the Hero’s Journey was warped and impossible to begin with, from this view Yuknavitch’s Misfit Time straightens itself out. Misfit Time, like queer time, offers the opportunity for life unscripted by the narratives men wrote for women. It is for people like Lidia who, whether because they struggle with trauma or simply because they don’t like to follow the rules, struggle to stay on the timeline that prescribes graduating college, having a career, getting married, having children, and dying in that order. Misfit Time refuses to accept that “the way things happened” is an objective story that is easy to pin down. In Misfit Time, different, contradictory timelines layer over each other and which timeline is valid depends on who you ask.
In writing about scriptotherapy, Hencke was looking specifically at women’s trauma in life writing. She writes that one way psychologists define trauma is as an event or a series of events that fragment the victim’s sense of self (Hencke xvii). Once when Yuknavitch is young and her dad throws a plate at her, she says she “waited for the shatter but nothing happened” (58). In many ways, the adult narrator is still waiting for that shatter. In order to integrate the fragmented self, the narrator in The Chronology of Water must break everything down into pieces first to take a close look at each shard. For Lidia, one point of breakage shows up in how she feels about her father, who was emotionally and sexually abusive towards her and her sister for the duration of her childhood. Lidia is simultaneously the person who said “before I hated him I loved him” (116) and the person who identifies parts of her father in herself, and the person who pulls her drowning father out of the ocean and thinks, “I could have killed him” (108). If she feels guilty for ever feeling warmth towards her father, she does not explicitly say this. Rather, she will write and rewrite her childhood, letting the reader see her process of experimenting with stories about the joy (“A Happy Childhood,” “Father”) without the pain, or stories that are just straight-up pain (“This is Not About My Sister”). Somehow, Yuknavitch makes both stories true simultaneously. Yuknavitch says that “all the years of your life” wail “like needy children” (224).
By separating those two different participants running on their individual timelines, one who is just a kid who loves her family and loves to swim, and another kid who suffers from incredible trauma at the hands of those she is supposed to be able to trust, the narrator finds a way to deal with each participant, who each need different things from her, separately. The happy participant wants to be remembered, validated, and forgiven. The traumatized participant also wants to be remembered and validated, and dealt with, and given rocks and other coping mechanisms that the narrator has better access to looking back than the participant had at the time. Yuknavitch is doing exactly what Suzette Hencke noted from her research on women’s life writing a decade or two ago by putting the fragmented participant in direct conversation with the wiser but still struggling reflective/reflexive consciousness. In doing so, as Hencke suggests, Yuknavitch gives the participant back her agency (Hencke xv). After breaking everything down into pieces and giving each shard what it needs, the narrator can begin to glue the pieces back together.
The older participant struggles to overcome the cycle of abuse rather than inherit her father’s anger or find herself in a relationship with someone like him. It takes her a while to escape that dynamic in her earlier relationships before she finally finds Andy and Miles. Here, she reaches across time to put her new family members and her new self in dialogue with her older family and older self. In this cosmological family reunion, Yuknavitch meets her mother where her mother is born, where her mother gives birth to her, in her mother’s childhood, when her father tries to punch her mother, and in other punch-to-the gut moments in “How to Love Your Mother After She’s Dead” (227). Later, Yuknavitch’s now-integrated seven-year-old self swims with her seven-year-old boy Miles. Without putting these different selves in conversation with each other, Yuknavitch adds depth and wholeness to every character in her life story, and heals violence that shadows across generations.
For the reader, Yuknavitch’s jumps in time can at first feel disorienting. Yuknavitch does not want the reader to simply accept what she writes as truth and settle quietly into the narrative, but constantly reminds us that this is her fictional construct of what really happened. However, the structure of tiny chapters with lots of space on the pages between them, and the technique of jumping between times of deep trauma and times of almost-joy gives the reader the opportunity to take breaks between traumas. Though Yuknavitch is more concerned with fulfilling her right to tell her own story slant than with making her audience feel comfortable, she never lies to the reader about when she stories over things. In places, the book reads less like a book and more like an experiment in drafts telling different stories of the same real events, but the reader has no way of knowing how many drafts the writer went through before settling on what she published. Not all scriptotherapy is for the readers’ eyes.
When Hencke was studying women’s life writing in 1998, she noticed what she called “a pattern of repressed trauma and psychological fragmentation” stemming from rape, incest, child sexual abuse, unwanted pregnancy, pregnancy loss, severe illness, and other traumas that women and girls often face (xii). Hencke recommended scriptotherapy as a way for writers to cope with PTSD outside of psychoanalysis where the life writer instead at once plays both the analyst and analyzed (xvi). Life writing is a particularly powerful mode of healing because “every autobiography imposes narrative form on an otherwise fragmented personal history” (xiv). Life writers, and particularly women life writers who have often found themselves left out of traditional storytelling models like the Hero’s Journey, certainly find in Yuknavitch a useful model for healing in how she collapses and manipulates time to integrate fractured selves. By accepting a non-linear form as another valid way of telling the hero’s journey, and Lidiatakes back control over a narrative that tells the story of a child participant who did not have any control.
Works Cited
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Pantheon Books, 1949.
Halberstam, Judith. “Queer Temporality and Postmodern Geographies.” Critical Theory: A
Reader for Literary and Cultural Studies, edited by Robert Dale Parker. Oxford U P, 2012, pp. 364-377.
Hencke, Suzette A. Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life Writing. St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
Yuknavitch, Lidia. The Chronology of Water. Hawthorne Books and Literary Arts, 2010.
—. “The Beauty of Being a Misfit.” TED. 2016. Video.
<https://www.ted.com/talks/lidia_yuknavitch_the_beauty_of_being_a_misfit?language=en>
—. The Misfit’s Manifesto. TED Books, 2017.
