Julie Marie Wade – författare

A nostalgic and poignant coming-of-agestory told through one young woman’s relationships with the mother figures inher life

Relationshipsbetween mothers and daughters can often be complicated and fraught. Even in thebest of circumstances, many of us may have grown up curious about the mothersof our friends—looking to them, learning from them (for better or for worse), andwondering what it would be like to be a part of their families.

OtherPeople’s Mothersis a collection of interconnected, autobiographical essays that explore therelationship between a daughter, her mother, and the other mothers present intheir lives. In this coming-of-age memoir, Julie Marie Wade traces a nexus offemale influences on her formative years in the ’80s and ’90s.Through words and actions, the women around her communicate powerful and oftencontradictory messages about class, religion, education, and morality, holdingenormous power over Wade’s journey toward adulthood.

Inexpanding her exploration of motherhood and daughterhood to include these “othermothers,” Wade takes a new and surprising kaleidoscopic approach to herportrayals of family life. This book reveals a young woman in the late twentiethcentury grappling with gendered expectations, beauty and body ideals, andcomplex messages about who she is permitted—or destined—to become.

"For a long time, everything only happened to other people," Julie Wade writes. Or so she thought. She records her falls. The "stunned body, the purloined speech" she experiences after crashing to the ground from a swing. The sensation of slipping from the platform saddle atop a circus elephant, sliding "flat as a penny against his wrinkled skin, rattling the bones of my ribs." The shame and uncertainty of being spilled from the security of parental love. And, finally, triumphantly, the felix culpa, the fortunate fall, of love.

Juxtaposed against the fragmentary structure of the memoir, this fall comprises both the energy source, the burning center of the book, and its thematic vantage point. Falling in love is an explosion in Julie''s mind as well as her body, an epiphany that remakes the map of her world, slicing the knot of her parents'' shame, unmasking the visceral truths of her body. In love she is in motion, reimagining the past, striking out on road trips. Suddenly, she is living, grabbing, tasting, writing, her mouth full of "honey and moonlight," her mind afire. And we are reminded yes, this is what love does, this is how it saves us.

Julie Wade has received the Oscar Wilde Poetry Prize (2005), the Literal Latte Nonfiction Award (2006), the AWP Intro Journals Award for Nonfiction (2009), the American Literary Review Nonfiction Prize (2010), the Arts & Letters Nonfiction Prize (2010), the Thomas J. Hruska Nonfiction Prize (2011), the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir (2011), and seven Pushcart Prize nominations.