Martha Zinger

The Chronology of Water is astonishingly beautiful, and, as a writer, Yuknavitch is a force. Her writing hits you, hard. It rocks you. She knocked me over with passages so brilliant, so true, I had to reread them over and over until I could bear to let them go in order to move on to the next paragraph. The first chapter, where she writes about giving birth to her stillborn baby daughter, is so profoundly moving and visceral and honest, I was practically shaking after I read it. I looked up from the book wide-eyed, my voice gone mute, with nothing except the words “holy shit” scrolling through my mind on a loop. If I had to recommend one book that I’ve read in the last three years, it would be this one.

I’m so full of shit in so many ways, you know. I always say I don’t believe in God, and I really don’t think I believe in a creator. I have a real hard time with that view that seems to me kind of childlike and simplistic. But I do believe in the divine, and I do believe in grace and mystery and spirits, probably, and maybe even angels. I don’t believe in the devil. I love Tom Waits’s line from “Heartattack and Vine”: “There is no devil, there’s just God when he’s drunk.

As for the alligators — I swear to God, if an alligator walked into this apartment right now, I really think I could incapacitate it. [Laughter] I’m forgetting it now, the way you forget information after a test, but there was a period where I really believed I could do it. I was like, “Let there be an alligator that crawls out of the sewer, and I’ll save everybody. I will stop that alligator so fast!