Otherwise: Essays by Julie Marie Wade; Autumn House Press; 240 pages; $18.95
In her newest book, Otherwise: Essays, Julie Marie Wade maps unexpected landscapes onto ordinary and familiar subjects. With each essay, the author explores her burgeoning girlhood, weddings, guns, butterflies, Queerness, the pert bodies of women, the “bristled bodies of men,” Roman Catholic rigor, and the tough grace of life’s everyday realities. The collection is cornerstoned by numbered meditations written when she was that age. For instance, “Mediation 32,” “Mediation 35,” and “Mediation 38.” Her age-centered essays are interspersed by ones with jaunty titles like Tremolo, Still Life with Guns”, and “Nine Innings.”
In these essays, Wade drills down, celebrates, and questions the wonders, beauty, and mysteries of the everyday. Wabi Sabi, the Japanese concept of finding beauty in ordinary life, comes alive in Wade’s beautiful essays. Her prose lingers over a votive candle her cousin slips into her pocket, an information card at church, and Wade’s sweaty palms in her Gore-Tex gloves. We strain our reading necks to follow her light, lyrical prose as she wanders from life’s pathos to life’s wonders.
Wade channels these repeating questions. As a Queer Woman who doesn’t fit precisely into any one mold, is she a full citizen of our society? Is she fully human, as a lesbian who does not have the same rights as her heterosexual counterparts? These queries play out as Wade interrogates her relationship with marriage before and after it fell as a heteronormative institution. And they continue as she teases new literary life out of the overused metaphor of a butterfly.
The book starts with Mediation 32. We meet the quirky, curious Wade as a girl. Her mother instilled the rules and benefits of heterosexual Marriage. The essay is deftly divided into required marriage cliches, sectioned into old, borrowed, blue, and new. It is clever and full of wit and humor, with sections that are both ironic and playful. The author lets us know we are in adept hands that will dip us into the unexpected.
Wade beautifully handles tension as this wise adult looks back to tell the tale of her younger selves: the unsure teenager getting a copy of Seventeen magazine, or the curious but confused child who thinks a wedding is a fashion show.
She sensitively explores love’s fraught landscape within the narrow confines of heterosexual marriage:
I could picture the valleys, too—snowy, deep, untrodden. It seemed every mountain had one. The valley beside Love was Lonely. The valley beside Marriage was single. The valley beside Baby was Childless. How I wanted to find the crocus heads pushing up through that cold, cup them with my woolly mittens. How I wanted to lay myself down and make snow angels, one after the next, until a path could be forged across angels’ bodies. Maybe then—it required a deep breath—maybe then those angels would bless the valleys where only the very sad or the very brave dare to tread.
While she grows up with her mother’s promise and the threat of Marriage, she learns that in the 1990s, marriage doesn’t extend to all of society’s corners. When she finds her own love, a woman, she learns that they cannot be married. In contrast to Wade wishing that she had the option to marry, she doesn’t know if she wants to marry. Her partner is indifferent, but Wade knows this choice should be hers to make, not some distant judging politician.
Wade’s focus on society’s constructs and how she fits or doesn’t with these narrow rules questions the value of her Queer humanity. Is she truly human if she can’t marry the woman she loves? If she wants to stay in between the valleys, she has defined as lonely, childless, and single?
Wade remains a wordsmith extraordinaire who deftly throws words around, choosing to situate her own coming-of-age within the long traditions of the bildungsroman and concupiscence. She asks us to consider the difference between consecration and consummation. But, she is not superior in her wordplay, and instead achieves a balance between knowing and curiosity. She has an everywoman curiosity about the words she chooses and the questions they bring. She seems to ask, aren’t you curious too? And in her skilled hands, readers feel comfort. We follow along the path she’s crafted to the source of her butterfly’s flutter.
A master of memories, Wade conjures the echoing sound of “solid heels clicking on the newly shined floor” before a woman’s disappearing hand appears to lay a pamphlet on a counter. These are the ways that the author plays with form and prose. Each essay is a new discovery of Wabi Sabi, exploring both prose and life.
Variations abound to keep us moving. “Still Life With Guns” is organized with bullets, and “Meditation 35” is organized by numbers, as is the collection’s last essay, “Mediation 38.” “Mediation 38” is a tour deforce organized into 38 distinct sections, all focused musings on the butterfly. This reader wondered, what is there left to write about a butterfly? Isn’t a trite subject, well-worn and worked over? And yet Wade’s essay uncovers new territory. Select sentinel words like soften and natural echo and repeat them throughout the book and culminate in Mediation 38. Wade asks what is it to soften? What is it to be natural? She takes her time to answer; she explores the question’s possibilities along with butterfly kicks, butterfly kisses, a butterfly-shaped thyroid, butterfly rib cages, and the Wabi Sabiness of it all.
She is wry and funny. She never takes herself too seriously but reminds us of the gravity of each subject: childhood, Queerness, Marriage, gender, guns, and butterflies. She is the rare writer who pushes to new heights of understanding while never coming off as superior. She stays with us in the bleachers. She starts the conversation about belonging, about being a citizen of the world and our country where her Queerness is marginalized and not accepted, about the fullness of her humanity in hostile environments. Her answer is yes; she is a complete uniquely human citizen. One defined by her own parameters. Her answer leaves us tantalized and thinking: What beauty have we missed in the ordinary moments of our lives? Otherwise lingers on your mind. Her questions stay, and her explorations provoke. She seems to ask, isn’t it all complicated, sometimes terrible, sometimes wonderful? This reader would answer yes.