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A Memoir
by Jaquira Díaz
With a story reminiscent of Tara Westover's Educate and Roxane Gay's Hunger, celebrated writer Jaquira Díaz triumphantly maps a way out of despair toward love and hope and delivers a memoir that reads as electrically as a novel.
"There is more life packed on each page of Ordinary Girls than some lives hold in a lifetime." —Julia Alvarez
Ordinary Girls is a fierce, beautiful, and unflinching memoir from a wildly talented debut author. While growing up in housing projects in Puerto Rico and Miami Beach, Jaquira Díaz found herself caught between extremes: as her family split apart and her mother battled schizophrenia, she was surrounded by the love of her friends; as she longed for a family and home, she found instead a life upended by violence. From her own struggles with depression and sexual assault to Puerto Rico's history of colonialism, every page of Ordinary Girls vibrates with music and lyricism. Díaz triumphantly maps a way out of despair toward love and hope to become her version of the girl she always wanted to be.
"[A] compelling debut. A must-read memoir on vulnerability, courage, and everything in between from a standout writer." - Library Journal (starred review)
"[A] strong debut ... gripping ... Díaz's empowering book wonderfully portrays the female struggle and the patterns of family dysfunction." - Publishers Weekly
"[Ordinary Girls] belongs on your must-read lists. Díaz is a masterful writer ... Writing with refreshing honesty, she talks about despair, depression, love, and hope with such vibrancy that her vivid portrayal will stay with you long after the final page."
- O: The Oprah Magazine
"Every once in a while, a truly electric debut memoir comes along, and this fall, Ordinary Girls is it. It's the story of an ordinary girl; it's the story of all of the extraordinary girls. Díaz is a skilled writer; the depth of layering is strong, from the details to the larger structures of identity, white supremacy, colonialism, and brown, queer, and femme resilience and resistance."
- BuzzFeed
"Díaz does not flinch with the hard-hitting details of growing up in communities that deserve our wholehearted attention. She complicates how we imagine girlhood and offers a beautiful memoir written with so much love, compassion and intelligence. This book is a necessary read at a time where the system and the media is so often working against the survival of women of color. This book burns in the memory and makes one feel all the feelings. A triumph!"
- Bustle (Angie Cruz, author of Dominicana)
"A dynamic examination of the power of persistence."
- Time (Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2019)
"Outstanding. A powerful and lyrical coming-of-age story, Ordinary Girls is a candid illustration of shame, despair and violence as well as joy and triumph. Against a Puerto Rican backdrop, this debut is compassionate, brave and forgiving." - Ms. Magazine
"At once heartbreaking and throbbing with life in a rich portrait that's anything but ordinary."
- Good Housekeeping (The 50 Best Books of 2019 to Add to Your Reading List)
"There's a certain ferocity throughout the entirety of Ordinary Girls. For some of the book, it's humming like a hardworking engine - concealed under the hood, always present - but then there are moments when it combusts, bursting from the page in such a way that you, as a reader, have to pause and take a breath. Ordinary Girls is an electrifying, deftly-paced debut."
- Salon
"Diaz's resilience and writing abilities are far from ordinary; she's an emissary from an experience that many young women have. Listen." - Refinery29
"A whirlwind memoir. Like Maya Angalou's seminal 1969 memoir I know Why the Caged Bird Sings before it, Ordinary Girls, is brutally honest in a way that few books dare to be."
- Bitch
"Striking. Díaz's story is absolutely breathtaking."
- NBC Latino
"A fierce, unflinching account of ordinary girls leading extraordinary lives."
- Poets & Writers
"Every so often you discover a voice that just floors you - or rather, feels like it can bulldoze something in your very soul. This fall, that voice belongs to Jaquira Díaz."
- The Week (25 Books to Read in the Second Half of 2019)
"In her debut memoir, Jaquira Díaz mines her experiences growing up in Puerto Rico and Miami, grappling with traumas both personal and international, and over time converts them into something approaching hope and self-assurance. For years, Díaz has dazzled in shorter formats - stories, essays, etc. - and her entrée into longer lengths is very welcome."
- The Millions
"She is a wondrous survivor, a woman who has claimed her own voice, a writer who writes for those who have no voice." - Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street
"A powerful memoir, heart-wrenching, inspiring, thoroughly engrossing, reminiscent of Mary Karr's The Liar's Club, Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and more recently Tara Westover's Educated. Through one family's story, we learn about challenges of poverty, migration, uprootedness, addiction, sexism, racism--but also about the triumphant, spirited storyteller who survives to tell the tale. Jaquira Díaz is our contemporary Scheherazade, telling stories to keep herself alive and whole, and us her readers mesmerized and wanting more. And we get it: there is more life packed on each page of Ordinary Girls than some lives hold in a lifetime." - Julia Alvarez, author of In the Time of the Butterflies
"A life story of astonishing honesty and beauty and power, a memoir of breath and rhythm and blood-red struggle, a book for everyone who has ever felt homesick inside their own skin, and for those who, like Díaz, sing the marvelous song of themselves at top volume." - Karen Russell, author of Orange World
"Jaquira Díaz writes about ordinary girls living extraordinary lives. And Díaz is no ordinary observer. She is a wondrous survivor, a woman who has claimed her own voice, a writer who writes for those who have no voice, for the black and brown girls 'who never saw themselves in books.' Jaquira Díaz writes about them with love. How extraordinary is that!" - Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street
"Díaz blazes a bold path from the depths of the heart and guts of girls up through their fiercely beautiful throats into unstoppable song. Ordinary Girls risks dipping into family fractures, identity traumas, and the strained lines between cultures with language so fierce in places I bit my tongue, so tender in places I felt humming in my skin. Sometimes the repressed, oppressed girl, against all odds, goes back to get her own body and voice. This book will save lives." - Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan
"Jaquira Díaz is an unstoppable force. Her writing is alive with power. I stand in awe of what she brings us. The future is here." - Luís Alberto Urrea, author of The House of Broken Angels
This information about Ordinary Girls was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jaquira Díaz was born in Puerto Rico. Her work has been published in Rolling Stone, the Guardian, the Fader, and The New York Times Style Magazine, and included in The Best American Essays 2016. She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, an Elizabeth George Foundation grant, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Kenyon Review, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She lives in Miami Beach with her partner, the writer Lars Horn. Visit her at jaquiradiaz.com.
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