A review by ari76
Ordinary Girls by Jaquira Díaz

4.0

After a week of contending recent revelations of scholars like Jessica Krug masquerading as Black Latinas and claiming a childhood spent in the "hood", finishing Jaquira Díaz's memoir of her life in Puerto Rico and Miami washed over me like a sea. Her life and her words illuminate why playing pretend with these narratives is invalidating, entitled, and dangerous. Díaz is a great storyteller whose ability to weave in the details (outfits, songs playings, food being consumed) kept me flipping my digital pages, and whose ability to name her pain and suffering gave me pause many times. This is her story to tell, and to this end, I list my wishes about the memoir while understanding communicating one's life is rarely a finishable (new word?) task. I wish there was more about her transitions to and from the military, graduate school, and to writing full time. I wish there was more of Puerto Rico's history woven throughout the book, so I could engage with the ending pieces much more. Most selfishly, I wish for more about her queerness journey and how she made sense of things when older.

Regardless of my wishes, Díaz and her memoir make clear from the beginning that her girls were her foundation and deserve the unconditional humanity given to whiter, richer, and tamer girls in this world. Her ode to friendship and girlhood is what makes this for me, so I end with this quote:

I will know that I was lucky to find thems, the kind of friends who bring you halfway across the world, who fly with you to Puerto Rico, who hold you at your grandmother's funeral, who invite you into their home, invite into their families, take care of you, check on you, fight for you, who make you want to be better, who give you their time and attention, share their secrets, their dreams, their communities, who show up, who see you, who hear you calling from hundreds of miles away, and slowly, slowly, love you back to life."