Jaquira Díaz

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Maria Esquinca

Jaquira Díaz

press release: A Room of One's Own welcomes Jaquira Díaz, author of Ordinary Girls!

In her eloquent, evocative, and fiercely candid memoir, Ordinary Girls, Jaquira Díaz revisits a girlhood spent in a dangerous world where girls like her had no one who understood where they fit in. Growing up a black sheep in housing projects in Miami and Puerto Rico, she was by her own account a juvenile delinquent—repeatedly arrested, a street fighter, a runaway, a high school dropout, a suicide risk. Jaquira struggled with depression and drug abuse as she tried to make sense of her identity as the queer, biracial, displaced daughter of an often absent Puerto Rican father and a white mother who fought her own battles with mental illness. Surrounded by a tight group of loving friends, she nonetheless longed for the love and security of family and home. Says Díaz, "I wrote Ordinary Girls for girls and women who are like the girl I was, like the woman I am now. For those who never saw themselves in books. For Puerto Rico and the diaspora, for anyone who knows what it’s like to be poor and still feel joy and hope. For mothers and daughters. For survivors of sexual violence, survivors of suicide, for anyone who’s ever known depression or mental illness.”

Jaquira Díaz’s work has been included in The Best American Essays, and she is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the Kenyon Review, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the MacDowell Colony, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is a visiting assistant professor in the MFA program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work appears in Rolling Stone, the Guardian, the Fader, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and other publications.

“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

“A fierce, unflinching account of ordinary girls leading extraordinary lives.” —Poets & Writers

“More so than many, Ordinary Girls will be treasured and studied not just for its testimony of survival, but also its stunning and refreshingly consistent strength of style. Every page shimmers with assuredness and the strength of somebody who has survived to tell this story but also knows that survival is a daily process. Ordinary Girls is a fierce, beautiful, uncompromising memoir about survival, motherhood, love, forgiveness, and identity. It's harrowing with a purpose.” —Popmatters.com

“Jaquira Díaz’s Ordinary Girls is more than a memoir. It is an awe-inspiring, middle-finger-waving rejection of the cult and culture of shame that pervades Latinx communities. …an unflinching yet compassionate dissection of the pain, love, and violence that cast Díaz’s life in equal parts light and shadow. …a love letter to the girls who have been stigmatized and silenced and hurt and left behind, to those of us whose families are both a source of incredible joy and immense pain, to all of us who contemplated dying more times than we could count and came back up for air at the last possible second. …a homecoming for those of us who miss our pátria, a mirror for those of us looking for our ancestors. …a history of Puerto Rico that trickles into the present, right up until the devastating aftermath of Hurricane María. And perhaps most importantly, Ordinary Girls is a reminder to keep surviving in whatever way we know how, so that we can one day write ourselves out of despair and into the people we could be—without shame.” —Women’s Review of Books

“[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

“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