Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing

by Julie Marie Wade

You have a history, and a body. You are a history, and a body. Your body has (is) a history, too. As a girl, Julie Marie Wade was uninterested in makeup, boy-watching, and other trappings of conventional girlhood, much to her mother’s disappointment. Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe—movie stars immortalized as feminine ideals, even as they both died tragically and young—were lodestars that threw Wade’s own definition of beauty into relief as she stumbled into adulthood.

Now, in Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing, Wade traces the intimate story of coming of age in one particular body (as a lesbian, an only child, a Protestant attending Catholic school). She uses the language and tenets of music, math, religion, fairy tales, poetry, and art to reckon with the many facets of embodiment, sexuality, and love in our contemporary world. The diet industry, popular culture, and her own family all provide rich material for what is ultimately a lyrical and unflinching investigation into the questions that prickle deep within the human heart.
 

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Feminism, Poetry, Essays

208 pages, Paperback

First published February 27, 2020

About the author

Born in Seattle in 1979, Julie Marie Wade completed a Master of Arts in English at Western Washington University in 2003, a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh in 2006, and a PhD in Humanities at the University of Louisville in 2012. She has received the Chicago Literary Award in Poetry (2004), the Gulf Coast Nonfiction Prize (2004), the Oscar Wilde Poetry Prize (2005), the Literal Latte Nonfiction Award (2006), two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prizes (2006, 2010), the AWP Intro Journals Award for Nonfiction (2009), the American Literary Review Nonfiction Prize (2010), the Arts & Letters Nonfiction Prize (2010), an Al Smith Artist Grant from the Kentucky Arts Council (2010), the Thomas J. Hruska Nonfiction Prize (2011), the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir (2011), the Bloom Nonfiction Chapbook Prize (2012), a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund (2012), and seven Pushcart Prize nominations. Julie is the author of two collections of lyric nonfiction, Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures (Colgate University Press, 2010) and Small Fires (Sarabande Books, 2011); two collections of poetry, Without (Finishing Line Press, 2010) and Postage Due (White Pine Press, 2013); the creative nonfiction chapbook Tremolo: An Essay (Bloom Press, 2013); and the forthcoming When I Was Straight: Poems (A Midsummer Night's Press, 2014). She lives with her partner Angie Griffin in the Sunshine State and teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami.

Reviews

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are not enough stars to praise Julie Marie Wade's JUST AN ORDINARY WOMAN BREATHING.

She invades her own privacy as if she just discovered the color she painted the room is totally wrong and rather than pick another color proceeds to level the walls. Her revelations about herself and her adamant refusal to accept the burdensome array of categories that one is supposed to be assigned to is so eloquently delivered in an unprecedented style of stunning literature. She makes crashing glass ceilings so last century. She presents her vulnerability with confidence, daring to define a view unseen.
Her writing explores, discovers, reveals, and innovates common scenarios with a new light, beyond assignment or expectation.
Just An ordinary Woman Breathing is a literary maelstrom that serves up moments of sheer pleasure and enlightenment. I found myself totally in her corner, ensconced in a joyous ride, no longer obliged to identify prose or poetry but yearning to be moved again and again to new perspectives and thought-provoking surprises. Her writing is breathtaking, eminently sensual, and irresistible.

[Melody · Rating 3 out of 5]

Extended mathematical/formulaic metaphor

I am not gonna lie. All the let (A) mean this and (Q) mean that got me all tangled up and feeling stupid. But the reading experience is reasonably enjoyable. There is just a lot to be gleaned from between the lines and not in a way that feels very purposeful.

[bookmarkedbusy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wade interrogates the way women learn to view themselves and their bodies by taking an incisive look at her own life. Wade excels at the art of introspection, her precise mastery of the English language awed me.

‘His compliment tells me that he sees me as I see myself, which is more important even than seeing me as I want to be seen.’