"Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing" Book Review

By: Kathrin Merritt

Julie Marie Wade’s words seem to lift off the page like a thousand delicate butterflies floating higher until they vaporize back into the background that is her history. “Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing,” is a compilation of essays that reflect on Wade’s youth in a way that puts an organic spin on the typical ‘coming of age’ narrative. Wade’s life is riddled with brow-furrowing juxtaposition, from attending Catholic school as a Protestant to being a lesbian dating men. But it’s the way she gradually weaves pieces of her story together to fashion her own sense of authority and strength that makes her so innately captivating and relatable.

Wade's writing mimics her stream of thought – she’s on a train and you're just a passenger along for the ride. Every story is written based on how it connects to another event in Wade’s life, and she rarely gives context to the people and places being described. This detached style can be hard to follow, but it serves the author well in that it continually refocuses the reader’s attention on Wade’s experience.

The writing also revolves around a conglomeration of references to literature, math, language and pop culture that make each lesson she learns deeply intricate and thought provoking. As Wade grows and forms deeper connections to herself, you literally see her thought patterns getting more complex and stratified. Around the time she’s in late elementary school, Wade’s stories start to be interspersed with vocabulary words (s-p-e-l-l-e-d) out. Then as she gets older, her thoughts turn mathematical as she starts using algorithms to rationalize her life against the world she’s grown up in.

Throughout, Wade wrestles with her relationship to her body and her body’s relationship to the world. She continuously goes back to her idea, “dangerous is the epiphany that you are old enough to have a history” and that “you have a body.” She uses her gradually building self awareness to make comments on how beauty standards, family pressures and her surroundings have attempted to mold the way she navigates herself. You see these themes rising repeatedly as if it’s a recurring thought that’s gotten stuck in her head, but Wade draws on each to launch her story beyond these influences’ face value and come to her own conclusions about what they mean in her life in her own witty way. Referencing a magazine article entailing how a woman should dress for her body type Wade writes, “Using this science based tool, reviewed by our experts, discover whether you are an apple, a spoon, a ruler, or an hourglass. And all this time I had been thinking I was a woman.” But then she delves even further to compare how finding the right way to dress was similar to how she felt about the differences between Catholicism being taught in her school and Protestantism being preached in her home: silly and trivial. Wade knows just how to put you onto several streams of thought at once, leave you questioning what you’re reading and then rope you back in as if in an ‘eureka!’ moment in a way that mimics how we feel in our own lives when we look back at our past with a new perspective.

The way this book is written is pure art from the beautiful word crafting to the extended metaphors. I thoroughly enjoyed thumbing through this book for the nuance that stems from pouring your thoughts exactly as they come onto paper. Though confusing at times, Wade won’t leave you hanging too long and if she does at moments, that’s okay. The story fulfills its purpose just in being a source of catharsis for the author as she found her own sense of strength.