Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of the novel The Book of Joan; the nationally bestselling novel The Small Backs of Children, winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Award’s Ken Kesey Award for Fiction and Readers’ Choice Award; the novel Dora: A Headcase; the widely acclaimed memoir The Chronology of Water, a finalist for a PEN Center USA Award for creative nonfiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Award’s Readers’ Choice Award; and a critical book on war and narrative, Allegories of Violence (Routledge). The Misfit’s Manifesto, a book based on her recent TED talk, is forthcoming this fall.
Every story I have ever told has a kind of breach to it, I think. You could say that my writing isn’t quite right. That all the beginnings have endings in them.