Design Matters with Debbie Millman · Design Matters Media

Lidia Yuknavitch

March 16, 2026·1 hr 21 min·5 clips

Lidia's father threw her into Lake Washington as a child, but she didn't sink.

"I'm a good swimmer," she says. It lands first as a plain fact, then turns into a way of talking about art, writing, and the choice to keep helping people anyway. Debbie listens for the places where the life story starts to pull at the body. Childhood fear, creative hunger, and memory are close together here, sometimes too close for comfort. The art is still tucked away. She describes visual work kept under the bed or in the closet, reachable but protected, as if the old rule still holds: hide what matters. That habit has a childhood behind it, and Debbie lets the connection sit long enough to hurt. Then Boston comes back. Debbie asks about the move to be with her sister and the blood-colored Somerville house where Olga was dying of lupus. Olga fed people, took in strays, saw through her, and gave her a box of oil paints that had belonged to her husband. She could not keep them. The reason is rougher than ingratitude. Kindness can burn when a person has not learned how to receive it. Love can ask for an admission before the body is ready: desire, a soul, the wish to become more than the person who survived. Debbie keeps pressing, gently. She ties that refusal to a scene from The Chronology of Water, the family trip framed as Christmas tree hunting. The father leaves with the older sister, comes back hours later without a tree, and the mother's candy turns into a thin, heartbreaking kind of sustenance. The body keeps score. Writing, in this excerpt, is not polish or career talk. It is where the body finally gets a mouth. Even the ending keeps that intimacy, with conversation and making a difference sitting close together without making a speech about it.

As heard by us

A memoir conversation that returns to the body and the challenge of receiving care.

Debbie Millman frames a conversation with writer and artist Lydia Yuknovich around trauma, writing, sex, and the centrality of the body. The episode keeps returning to the idea that speaking the body can be an act of saving one's own life, and the strongest moments arrive when…

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Why you'd press play

For when you want a quiet, serious conversation about art, writing, and the body, with a little tenderness baked in.

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