Letter to My Rage

An Evolution

By Lidia Yuknavitch

2020

First Published

4.00

Average Rating

Number of Pages

0H49M

Audio Length

Letter to My Rage opens in a clinic where the author is waiting to be tested for COVID-19 antibodies. A sighting of the unmasked face of the president on the clinic TV makes her travel “beyond anger” to seethe at an administration ill-prepared to battle a pandemic or confront the racial and economic disparities that ensure vulnerability not just to disease but to a host of human brutalities. And she doesn’t stop there—she can’t. Throughout her life, rage, rather than destroying her, has transformed and compelled her: It was rage that forced her to claim her body: its blood, heat, and power; that ushered her into a world of ideas; and that would show her that where the political and the personal intersect, art flourishes, community and solidarity are found, and change begins. With the murder of George Floyd, her rage reaches an apotheosis. She joins the protests and asks that if men’s anger is frequently used to reinforce an unequal system—as in the grotesque spectacle of a white man’s knee on a Black man’s neck—how can women’s be used? How can her own? Can it be as constructive as it is destructive? Can it create something that was not there before and not just for her? As she sits in that waiting room, she knows the answer is in the body that’s contained her rage for so long, in her very blood; it can offer protection, fuel for others’ activism, a chance for a cure.

Avg Rating

4.00

Number of Ratings

5 STARS

33%

4 STARS

42%

3 STARS

17%

2 STARS

1 STARS

goodreads

Author

Lidia Yuknavitch

Author · 13 books

Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of the National Bestselling novels The Book of Joan and The Small Backs of Children, winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Award's Ken Kesey Award for Fiction as well as the Reader's Choice Award, and the novel Dora: A Headcase, Her widely acclaimed memoir The Chronology of Water was a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for creative nonfiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Award Reader's Choice. Her nonfiction book based on her TED Talk, The Misfit's Manifesto, is forthcoming from TED Books. She founded the workshop series Corporeal Writing in Portland Oregon, where she teaches both in person and online. She received her doctorate in Literature from the University of Oregon. She lives in Oregon with her husband Andy Mingo and their renaissance man son, Miles. She is a very good swimmer.