Wishbone

"For a long time, everything only happened to other people," Julie Wade writes. Or so she thought. Confused by the "jigsaw nature of the gendered puzzle" and her mother's mercurial love, she becomes exiled from her own body, a witness to her own life. Watching, she writes upon memory with poetic precision, noting the sensual and "exhilarating darkness" of a pumpkin's "pith and seed," the "monstrous wad" of an octopus's tentacles, a violent murder outside her college dormitory, the flaring intimacies she "perceived intensely but could not find words for" when touched or brushed by other girls or women. In particular, she records her falls. The "stunned body, the purloined speech" she experiences after crashing to the ground from a swingset. 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.