There is nothing ordinary about Julie Marie Wade’s Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing, a memoir of girlhood and all its formidable pains and pleasures. With obvious delight in the textures and sounds of language, and in a form all her own, Wade tells the story of her body as it has come into being: through her mother’s exacting demands for beauty, her Catholic school’s exacting demands for innocence, and her own intellect’s exacting demands for knowledge. Throughout, Wade’s mind on the page is entrancing, her sentences a joy to follow. She brilliantly reframes the coming-of-age narrative as that of a body coming into awareness of its fullness: of both the scars of its cruel inheritances, and its capacity for love.
Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing, by Julie Marie Wade. Published by Mad Creek Books/Ohio State University Press. The editor is Kristen Elias-Rowley. Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing is a finalist for the Publishing Triangle’s Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction; the winner will be announced on May 12.