Columbus, OH: Mad Creek Books, 2020. 171 pages. $18.95.
How can one balance the equation of womanhood, beauty, worth, sexuality, and death? Julie Marie Wade’s tenth book, Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing, attempts a lingual proof of this and other bodily math perplexing to a young lesbian coming of age in a conservative, religious household. The book opens with the searingly simple inquiry, “You have a body. Have? Are? No one is sure,” and subsequently attempts to discover how a girl can find self-worth in a society where she may be treated more as a commodity than an individual.
The nonlinear essays form a pastiche that mingles recollections of Catholic school, summer camp, and an early puberty strictly governed by an overbearing mother, with societal influences from Sound of Music to White Christmas, Mary Magdalene to Marilyn Monroe. As the pieces come together, math and attraction, loss and love coalesce in a young mind that best parses life through language. But even as she searches for the correct expressions, Wade’s child narrator is also reaching for a more definitive proof, one where a word like “cleave” cannot contain its own antonym (a crime for which she blames the biblical Adam, who, in her mind, created both the dictionary and thesaurus).
As in her previous work, Wade is interested in intersections and blurred boundaries—be it in form, content or theme. Bodies in Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing are not fixed in place, but evolving under the pressures of popular culture, familial expectations and schoolyard bullying. Exhibit A: Wade doesn’t recognize her own post-pubescent form, “taller than everyone now,” when she returns for a second summer at camp.
Previously published under the titles “Hourglass I-V,” the five linked essays that make up Wade’s lyrical memoir blend poetry, prose, found text and original insights. Each is further subdivided, punctuated by subtitles, dinkuses, white space, memos, asides, and quotations. The essays subscribe to distinct internal logics: in the first, orchestration and memos; in the second, spelling and second-person asides; in the third, investigation via the Socratic method; in the fourth, present tense in both past and current scenes; and in the fifth, a semi-literal math proof addressing Wade’s “persistent question: Why does it matter?”. These techniques stamp each section as unique even as the whole builds to a revelation of self-acceptance and love.
Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing is smart. For a review, using that word sounds trite, but this book contains the kind of essays that I typically pretend to understand in mixed company until I Google enough references that I actually, kind of, might. Wade’s writing is equally self- and externally-referential. If you are, like me, unable to easily quote Pearl S. Buck or Plotinus or Jewel, I recommend you read the acknowledgements (helpfully separated by section) as you go for citations on the referenced works. Wade is a high priestess of language, believing from childhood that, “Words . . . are embodied, and like anything that has (is) a body, a word can be beautiful, or graceful, or ugly.” Exhibit B: Wade’s delightful commitment to wordplay—her parents both knead and need a daughter, a date is simultaneously considered a day, a stone fruit, and a romantic practice. The layers of Wade’s writing reflect how “language is like skin . . . eventually, no matter what you say, you are bound to strike blood or bone.”
In this case, the wounds struck are both literal and figurative, a shin painfully nicked when Wade steals her father’s razor to shave her legs for the first time, and a mind hurt by everyone who spies her budding sexuality and labels it a shameful deviance. Wade is most careful in the portrayal of her mother, a complex, if often hateful, character (representing a larger brand of conservative, religious heteronormativity). Her mother is fond of saying, “There are things a woman must do, if she discovers a deficit or an excess in her body.” Wade’s final answer to this is, thankfully, to find an excess of love inside herself and a wonderful woman to embody it—an act her mother gets no say in.
But it would be a disservice to make this sound like a simple lesbian coming-of-age story. Wade writes, “Thinking is long, and knowing is slow”—an apt summation of her essays. Though slim, Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing is not a quick read. This is the kind of work that rewards deep engagement and sticks in the back of your amygdala for days after you finish. Full of philosophy (and more math than you’d expect), the text really sings in scene. Wade’s dialogue is sharp, her characterizations rich, her experiences focused, her occasional humor a welcome relief from the angst of adolescence. Though her body’s history is specific, her questions are universal, and it’s pleasurable—if sometimes challenging—for the reader to come along for the ride.