Julie Marie Wade – författare

A nostalgic and poignant coming-of-age story told through one young woman's relationships with the mother figures in her lifeRelationships between mothers and daughters can often be complicated and fraught. Even in the best of circumstances, many of us may have grown up curious about the mothers of our friends' looking to them, learning from them (for better or for worse), and wondering what it would be like to be a part of their families. Other People's Mothers is a collection of interconnected, autobiographical essays that explore the relationship between a daughter, her mother, and the other mothers present in their lives. In this coming-of-age memoir, Julie Marie Wade traces a nexus of female influences on her formative years in the '80s and '90s. Through words and actions, the women around her communicate powerful and often contradictory messages about class, religion, education, and morality, holding enormous power over Wade's journey toward adulthood. In expanding her exploration of motherhood and daughterhood to include these 'other mothers,' Wade takes a new and surprising kaleidoscopic approach to her portrayals of family life. This book reveals a young woman in the late twentieth century grappling with gendered expectations, beauty and body ideals, and complex messages about who she is permitted - or destined - to become.

Why SIX? Because the collection is composed of six poems. And because the perspective in this collection shifts like a kaleidoscope, each image viewable from six possible angles. And because these poems, like the prevalent hexagons of the natural world—honeycombs, for instance—derive strength from their compression and their accumulation. “I call six times just to be sure you heard,” this speaker announces on the first page. These poems are also the six calls—calls to attention, calls to action, calls to account for something of our own. The speaker in SIX is insistent, scrupulous, and unflinching as she plumbs six essential aspects of human experience that have shaped us all: art, language, desire, vocation, faith, and life-changing love.

Who’s your hero? What television show did you binge-watch, even before “binge-watching” was part of our vernacular? For Julie Marie Wade, the hero is Mary Tyler Moore, the television show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show. From its premiere on Nick at Nite in 1992 until the death of its eponymous lead actress in 2017, this nonfiction novella follows our protagonist from her pre-teen years in Seattle through tenure at an academic institution in Miami—a journey modeled in surprising, tender, and humorous ways on Mary’s own journey from Roseburg to Minneapolis, to the WJM newsroom and beyond.

"Postage Due is a dazzling series of necessary utterances. Wade uses the language of Christianity to section her book, fraught with joy and pain, to explore what we owe and to whom. She employs postcards, letters, and literary and pop culture heroines--most notably Oz's Dorothy--to tell and retell of the dreamlike past. In Postage Due, you will meet the (post-confessional) young lady who fell from a star."--Denise Duhamel Postage Due is a sometimes ekphrastic, often epistolary scrapbook of poetic artifacts documenting an odd girl's coming of age. Julie Marie Wade is the author of two collections of lyric nonfiction, Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures and Small Fires.

This is a daughter’s story. In Small Fires, Julie Marie Wade recreates the landscape of her childhood with a lacemaker’s care, then turns that precise attention on herself. There are floating tea lights in the bath, coddled blossoms in the garden, and a mother straddling her teenage daughter’s back, astringent in hand, to better scrub her not-quite-presentable pores. And throughout, Wade traces this lost world with the same devotion as her mother among her award-winning roses. Small Fires is essay as elegy, but it is also essay as parsing, reconciliation, and celebration, all in the attempt to answer the question—what have you given up in order to become who you are?