Jaquira Díaz’s Journey of Transformation in ‘Ordinary Girls’

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In Jaquira Díaz’s electric and highly anticipated memoir, Ordinary Girls, the ordinariness that she refers to is multifaceted and often unexpected. As a young kid growing up in the Puerto Rican projects with a father who worked as a drug dealer, she didn’t initially understand that her life was anything other than ordinary. When her family relocated to Miami Beach and her mother began battling a severe mental illness, she saw other families’ lives as much more ordinary than her own. And as a self-described “closeted queer girl,” her identity and the related issues she struggled with growing up contributed to her yearning for what she saw as the ordinary lives of everyone other than herself. It is these teenage struggles, from drug abuse, depression, dangerous sexual relationships and encounters with the law, that she chronicles in her memoir, Ordinary Girls.

There was violence in this world, and by age 11, Díaz was attempting to inflict violence on herself through suicide attempts and failed efforts to run away from home. Her book is a story of transformation, yet it doesn’t pinpoint a single revelatory moment of transformative change. Rather, she broadens her writing to encompass the “ordinary” coming-of-age tragedies that young women around the globe struggle to overcome. Ordinary Girls is at once a dynamic and powerful story of Puerto Rico, modern America and learning to embrace the extraordinary parts of ourselves.

Jaquira Díaz is a visiting assistant professor of creative writing at UW-Madison and editor at the Kenyon Review. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Rolling Stone, The Guardian and The Best American Essays.

Jaquira Díaz will discuss her memoir, Ordinary Girls, at Boswell Book Co., 2559 N. Downer Ave., on Tuesday, Nov. 19, at 7 p.m.