Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing

by Julie Marie Wade

Overview

Winner, 2021 Housatonic Book Award
Finalist for the Publishing Triangle's Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction

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.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814255674
Publisher:	Ohio State University Press
Publication date:	02/27/2020
Series:	21st Century Essays
Edition description:	1
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	940,757
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Julie Marie Wade was born in Seattle in 1979. She went to school for a very long time. At some point, she knew she wanted to stay in school forever, so she became a professor. Now she teaches poetry, memoir, lyric essay, and hybrid forms at Florida International University in Miami. She is married to Angie Griffin. This is her eleventh book.

Editorial Reviews

Intelligent and lyrical, the narrative mingles often comic musings on female embodiment with insightful observations about the meaning of love and self-acceptance. A sharp, innovative text.” —Kirkus Reviews
 


“Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing is a white-hot meteor streaking straight to the heart of individual identity.” —Danielle Ballantyne, Foreword Reviews
 

“These smart, language-rich, self-knowing essays manage a beautiful balance of the comic and the rueful. Whether affirming or rebutting the notion that ‘anatomy is destiny,’ they fulfill our contemporary longing for an embodied literature.” —Phillip Lopate
 

“For the territory we call the body, I nominate Julie Marie Wade as poet laureate. In prose that shimmers with lyric energy, Wade allows us to see anew our bodies as verbs—constantly changing, constant in change. We are both tethered and untethered to language, and ‘eventually, no matter what you say, you are bound to strike blood or bone.’” —Brenda Miller, author of An Earlier Life

From the Publisher

2019-12-02
A distinguished essayist, poet, and professor reflects on a life lived in a female body.

In this memoir in essays, Wade (English/Florida International Univ.; When I Was Straight, 2014, etc.) meditates on her lifelong fascination with words, language, and the body. She opens with a piece that establishes herself as a body living in "a constellation of bodies" called a family. Wade depicts herself as a girl who loved the beauty of actresses like Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe but whose own body did not fit the conventional mold of feminine desirability. Like a scientist, she wrote about the imperfect bodies of those around her in journal entries that looked like "inventories" rather than personal reflections. In the second essay, the author examines the differences that sometimes made her feel like a "monster in your own closet." An only child who took comfort in an imaginary sister/friend, Wade developed secret affections for two females: a female teacher and a camp counselor. At the same time, she writes, "I have also failed to love someone I was expected to love—my first boyfriend." In the third and fourth essays, the author remembers adolescence as a time of growing awareness about the consequences of being female in a patriarchal society. While her parents warned her about the dangers of sex, she learned how to engage in heterosexual courting rituals that would lead to marriage and motherhood. Yet at the all-girls Catholic schools she attended that taught her to appreciate everything from religious difference (she was Protestant) to the "‘poetry [of] math," she also learned about the power women had to be autonomous beings. In the fifth section, Wade intermingles episodes from her early life with those that tell the story of her final, joyful acceptance of the lesbianism she had suppressed with a witty series of quasi-mathematical equations and philosophical propositions. Intelligent and lyrical, the narrative mingles often comic musings on female embodiment with insightful observations about the meaning of love and self-acceptance.

A sharp, innovative text.

Kirkus Reviews