Review: "Underwater Daughter" by Antonia Deignan

Underwater Daughter by Antonia Deignan
Published May 2023 via She Writes Press
★★★★

3.5 stars. Deignan's story is written to pull you under, into the waters of her life, starting with a childhood fraught with risk and shame and then moving along through cities, through traumas and triumphs, through the years.

It's a lot of story—enough so that Deignan could have opted to write it into multiple separate books, had she chosen. But thematically: trauma in body and trauma in mind; unexpected healings; being, through the thick and the thin of it, her mother's daughter to the end. Its scope is sweeping, spanning decades, sometimes diving in deep and sometimes skimming the surface. Dance and body image and sexual violence and career-changing injuries and death, building a spider's web of connections.

"I'm sorry," she never said to me. And out loud in return I never said, "I forgive you." But I did. I forgave her. Fuck. I never told her. Fuck. She never said it. (loc. 504*)

Deignan writes with the sensibilities of someone who has taken a lot of writing classes—this would have fit right in at my MFA program, and at times I wondered whether certain sections had started out as essays and been submitted to lit journals before being folded into Underwater Daughter. It's a style that can be polarizing, I think—this is for readers who like literary fiction, and stories that are not all told at once but rather fragment and twist and circle back to themselves, and a lot of questions without answers to match.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

*I read an ARC, and quotes may not be final.