Ordinary Girls
​Jaquira Díaz

Jaquira Díaz’s Ordinary Girls is a memoir of the author’s tumultuous life battling some pretty strong inner and outer demons. Having survived these ordeals, Díaz extends her extraordinary, individual experiences growing up to include both commonplace and outlying stories of girlhood more widely in order to demonstrate that all girls’ experiences are valid and worthwhile. Because her own lived experience deviates so far from the norm, Díaz recognizes her background as valid, worth telling, and worth reading about on par with more ordinary life stories.

Díaz writes of ordinary girls: “This is who I write about and who I write for. For the girls they were, for the girl I was, for girls everywhere who are just like we used to be. […] For the girls who are angry and lost. For the girls who never saw themselves in books.” The girls encompassed here seem to be misfits and familiar. For Díaz this is what it means to be an “ordinary girl”: a girl who is just finding her way through life given her particular set of circumstances, all of which are valid. With autobiographical authority, Díaz assigns validation to the individual yet collective experiences of all girls, these ordinary girls. Composing this memoir in mid-life, Díaz writes as a survivor of her childhood and adolescence and as an author who has grown into a firsthand understanding of the inclusive potential inherent in representations of girlhood. Ordinary Girls underscores an emerging realization that all girls’ experiences are important and fundamentally valid. 

Jaquira Díaz was born in Puerto Rico and grew up in Miami, Florida. She emerged on the other side of a tumultuous childhood and adolescence as a stronger individual who went on to graduate from the creative writing program at the University of Central Florida and to have an article featured in Rolling Stone. She currently lives in Miami.

Ordinary Girls is a publication by Algonquin Books. Click here to purchase.
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Reviewed by
Justin Edmund Watkins
​​​7/23/2020

Justin Edmund Watkins's interest in Spanish and Latinx culture began in middle school with his first Spanish class. Even after attending three universities in Florida and living in Panama and Ecuador, he still wants to experience more. He currently teaches English in South Korea.

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