71 POETS & WRITERS^ma
ri
a^ e
sq
ui
nc
a
NONFICTION 2019O
rdinary Girls is about my
girlhood in Puerto Rico and
Miami Beach, about growing
up queer and closeted, about
surviving depression and violence,
about love and friendship and family,
and about my relationship with my
mother. My mother, a white woman
who didn’t know how to raise or pro-
tect her Black children, who would
spend her entire life struggling with
mental illness and addiction, who was
(and is) deeply homophobic.
The writing, from beginning to end,
took about twelve years. I had to step
away from the book several times, and
there were many different versions. To
say that the writing of this book almost
broke me would be an understatement:
I gained weight, I lost weight, my hair
started falling out, I had the worst
insomnia I’ve had in my life. During
those twelve years, I lost relationships,
friendships, and then my grandmother
died by suicide. I often needed time
away from the book in order to take
care of myself and to make sense of
what I was doing, to interrogate dif-
ferent parts of the book, to examine my
life as I was living it. Writing nonfic-
tion for me has never been cathartic—
quite the opposite.
What kept me going? I wanted to
write about people who rarely had
a home in the literary landscape. I
wanted to write about growing up poor
and queer and Black and Puerto Rican,
about all the ways we are invisible and
hyper-visible. And I wanted to write
about my community without losing
sight of what mattered most: that the
people I was writing about were real.
That they existed, that they lived and
loved, even if the rest of the world
didn’t see them.
When I sent the manuscript to my
agent, Michelle Brower, it was a collec-
t ion of essays t hat wasn’t ver y focused.
We discussed it, and I decided that I
wanted it to be a memoir, not an essay
collection. After reading another draft,
Michelle gave me extensive notes,
which helped fill in some of what wasmissing. Several drafts later, Michelle
sent it out to editors. We got the offer
from Kathy Pories at Algonquin about
a week after that.
It was important that I could have
honest conver-
sations with my
editor, and Kathy
was always listen-
ing. She respected
my vision for the
work. Working
with Kathy, and
all the folks at Al-
gonquin, has been
such a collab-
orative process. I
feel lucky to have
them.JAQUIRA DÍAZ (^)
Ordinary Girls (Algonquin Books,
October), a debut memoir examining
the author’s childhood as a runaway,
juvenile delinquent, and high school
dropout who finds love and family;
a fierce, unflinching account of ordi-
nary girls leading extraordinary lives.
Agent: Michelle Brower. Editor: Kathy
Pories. First lines: “We were the girls
who strolled onto the blacktop on long
summer days, dribbling past the boys
on the court. We were the girls on the
merry-go-round, laughing and laugh-
ing and letting the world spin while
holding on for our lives. The girls on
the swings, throwing our heads back,
the wind in our hair. We were the loud-
mouths, the troublemakers, the prac-
tical jokers. We were the party girls,
hitting the clubs in booty shorts and
high-top Jordans, smoking blunts on
the beach. We were the wild girls who
loved music and dancing. Girls who
were black and brown and poor and
queer. Girls who loved each other.”
To say that the
writing of this book
almost broke me
would be an
understatement.
I often needed time
away from the book
in order to take care
of myself and to make
sense of what I was
doing, to interrogate
different parts of the
book, to examine my
life as I was living it.
Writing nonfiction for
me has never been
cathartic—quite
the opposite.