Best of Design Matters: Lidia Yuknavitch

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

This episode of Design Matters originally appeared in March of 2026

Lidia Yuknavitch (0:06)

I'm a good swimmer, and I mean that both in actual water and in the waters of art and writing. And that means I can help other people, and that's a reason to stick around.

SPEAKER_1 (0:20)

From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman.

On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they're thinking about and working on. On this episode, a conversation with writer and artist Lidia Yuknavitch about trauma, writing, sex, and the centrality of one's body.

Lidia Yuknavitch (0:46)

To speak the body is an act of saving one's own life, I think.

Debbie Millman (0:55)

Lidia Yuknavitch is the bestselling author of books which have blurred boundaries and genres and refuse the safety of neat categories in favor of something more luminous. Her 2011 memoir, The Chronology of Water, is now a contemporary classic and has recently been adapted into a feature film directed by Kristen Stewart. The movie has extended this remarkable story and structure into an entirely new artistic medium. Lidia's 2025 memoir, Reading the Waves, continues her inquiry into memory, embodiment, grief, and transformation. And her latest book, The Big M, is an unflinching collection of essays reclaiming menopause as a site of power, story, and freedom now.

For decades, Lidia has been building a body of work that asks what it means not just to survive a life, but to redesign and remake it. Lidia Yuknavitch, welcome to Design Matters.

Lidia Yuknavitch (1:57)

My complete pleasure. I'm really excited to be here.

Debbie Millman (2:01)

I am really excited you're here too. Lidia, I understand, I recently learned that you're ambidextrous.

Lidia Yuknavitch (2:08)

I am.

I got my hand thwacked by nuns early on when I was young in Catholic school. So I learned to, like most things in my life, I learned to kind of hide something that I was told was wrong with me. But as a person who's 62, I can do whatever I want with my hands, so I do.

Debbie Millman (2:29)

Were they whacking you because you were using your left hand and forcing you to use your right?

Lidia Yuknavitch (2:33)

Yes, yes.

Debbie Millman (2:34)

Oh, interesting. So conceivably, you really are a lefty, but you're also, do you write with the same ease, or do you depend on one hand more than another?

Lidia Yuknavitch (2:44)

It really was trained out of me, so I just sort of tucked my left hand under for years and years and years. And so I guess my right hand is my dominant hand, but it's interesting when I'm painting or drawing, I switch more often. And with writing, in terms of typing, you're using both hands all the time anyway, so it's less of an issue. But I'm bringing my left hand back to life.

Debbie Millman (3:10)

I love that. I love that. I have to say it's one of the things I'm proudest of about myself, even though I had really no control over which hand was going to be my dominant hand. But I love being a lefty.

Lidia Yuknavitch (3:21)

I love it about you.

Debbie Millman (3:25)

You've written that you don't see your life in order, that it comes in retinal flashes. When you reach for your earliest memory, what flashes first?

Lidia Yuknavitch (3:38)

Ordinarily sensory things like colors and sounds. If I had to name one single thing, it would be water, which would surprise no one at this point. But I had some kind of strange pull or attraction to or obsession with water. So the color blue and silver and the sound water makes, and just this entity that's water that pulls you, those are my earliest memories. So they're not of a family or friends or doing something that a kid would do.

They're located around senses.

Debbie Millman (4:20)

As I was preparing for our interview, I watched your film a second time and re-read The Chronology of Water, which I had read many years ago, and felt that my usual organization of inquiry didn't feel right.

And so I tried to structure this interview almost as retinal flashes as well. And so I'd like to share some of what you've written, and I'd also like to ask you to read some of what you've written of your own work, and then conduct sort of mini interviews about your writing and things that have really, really sort of buried themselves now deep into my skin. Are you okay with that?

Lidia Yuknavitch (5:09)