Lidia Yuknavitch re-remembers in her memoir “Reading the Waves.”

Over the past few decades, neuroscientists have made a series of findings, by way of fMRI scans, that suggest that memory relies on the same or similar parts of the brain as mind-wandering and imagination. Our memories, in other words, don’t live in some sort of mental library but are shifting stories that are remade even as we remember them. Such an idea undergirds Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir-cum-manifesto Reading the Waves. As Yuknavitch frames her project, “I mean to read a few episodes from my life not as facts but as fictions, as stories that lodged in my body.… I mean to ask if there is a way to read my own past differently, using what I have learned from literature: how stories repeat and reverberate and release us from the tyranny of our mistakes, our traumas, and our confusions.”

In so doing, she presents her own experiences as messy, subject to ever-deepening, changing interpretations that together form a bawdy literary criticism of self-making.

Yuknavitch shares stories of love affairs, brief sexual encounters, slant friendships, marriage, parenthood, other women’s writing, and solitude. Some of this material, including that involving her relationship with her former husband Devin Eugene Crowe—who subsequently either fell or threw himself off a construction crane—has already been detailed in her searing 2011 memoir, The Chronology of Water. But here we find the memories reconfigured, shaped by the passage of time.

At one point, Yuknavitch reveals that she has a “Book of Devin,” a black sketchbook he sent her when their marriage was ending, filled with poems and other writings. Sometimes, she acknowledges, her only response to the feelings it provoked was an unfiltered string of words. “No one is ever again going to say those kinds of things to me again,” she writes, “love language is death language no one is ever again going to mail me a book like they pulled out their own heart put it in an envelope sent it sailing across oceans and time to the one person they thought could carry it sometimes I’m scared it’s my fault he’s dead what if I had stayed with him through more crucibles.”

She doesn’t know what to do with these words except to put them into story, an act that gives them structure.

Other memories are also foundational, although in a quieter key. There’s her adolescent sexual interaction with a girl, an ecstatic moment marred when her mother interrupts. As Yuknavitch explains, “My mother’s early erasure of my erotic experience with a girl hides underneath every story.” She goes on to describe an encounter with a visiting artist in the intense style that characterized her first memoir: “She put her mouth to each of my nipples so that they shot up like they were screaming for the stars to take them back.”

And while The Chronology of Water detailed with a tense candor her father’s abuse of both Yuknavitch and her older sister—and her disabled mother’s failure to protect them—Reading the Waves emphasizes a new consideration of her parents now that both are dead, as well as the ways her upbringing affected her as both partner and parent.

In that sense, Reading the Waves is a kind of companion volume to The Chronology of Water, ultimately staking out a slightly different conceptual territory. Where the earlier book describes memory as contingent and hazy (“Events don’t have cause and effect relationships the way you wish they did. It’s all a series of fragments and repetitions and pattern formations”), this new work renders life mostly in “retinal flashes.” Often the author’s observations are the result of lengthy introspection, a mulling and combing over of the past. Reading the Waves is structured almost in surges of language—waves—rather than a set of narratives.

Sometimes the observations can be New Age aphoristic, coming off a bit teacherly (in line with her popular TED Talk about being a misfit) as Yuknavitch tells us how to understand her viewpoint without allowing for the ambiguity and engagement of dramatic scenes. That said, I thought Right on frequently while I was reading; Yuknavitch brings to this book the subdued wisdom of age—she is 60 and mentions feeling herself at the end of things—rather than the righteous ferocity of her younger self.

In the process, she opens the book to revelations about the impact of action, about ordinary people’s power to change their stories by moving in new directions that spur different ways of being. It’s not only that memory “inhabits” us, but that “we inhabit memory,” she suggests. “Can being or identity,” she asks, “move and change, spiral, like storytelling can?” Later, she intimates that our actions influence the stories we tell ourselves about what happened—and so we change. Fittingly, she frames this as another provocation: “Being, like imagination, is trans. It moves. Across. Beyond. Through. Change. Shapeshifting. Interbeing. Interspecies.”

What she means is that there is no set or finite memory—no final memoir, no last word. Rather, Yuknavitch reminds us, through the ordinary act of living, of resisting, of storytelling, we can put old pain down. New stories, different ones, are going to emerge. We have the power to reshape ourselves.•