Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures

Julie Marie Wade

Nov 2014 · Bywater Books

About this ebook

"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.

About the author

Julie Marie Wade: Born in Seattle, Washington, in 1979, Julie Marie Wade completed a Master of Arts in English at Western Washington University and a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh. Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures is her first book. Wade has received the Chicago Literary Award for Poetry, the Gulf Coast Nonfiction Prize, the Oscar Wilde Poetry Prize, the Literal Latte Nonfiction Award, the Arts & Letters Nonfiction Prize, the American Literary Review Nonfiction Prize, the Thomas J. Hruska Nonfiction Prize, an Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council, and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir. She is the newest member of the creative writing faculty at Florida International University and lives with her partner, Angie Griffin, in Dania Beach.

"I write best at intersections: The intersection of poetry and prose, past and present, sex and gender, families of origin and families of choice, heterosexual presumptions and lesbian experience. In all my work, I strive to pay close attention to language and the body." —Julie Marie Wade