Small Fires: Essays

In her collection of short vignettes, Small Fires: Essays (2011), Julie Marie Wade treats her own life as a time capsule, carefully removing moments and describing them with a poet's lyricism and precision. The book traces Wade's coming of age, as she struggles with the limits and expectations of her mother, an avid rose-gardener, and questions her own sexuality. By turns endearing, frightening, and relatable, Wade explores what it means to become what one is, considering what one has to give up in order to claim one’s identity and become one’s self.

The setting for Wade's memoir is primarily her childhood home, a space beautifully decorated and maintained by her mother, whose peculiarities become the source of estrangement for Wade as she comes into her own sense of self. Wade's mother, an avid rose gardener, is particular about her blooms, providing a perfect, curated space for them to grow. She treats Wade in a similar fashion, anticipating that if she creates the ideal environment, she will have the daughter she always wanted and imagined. This becomes an increasingly more painful fantasy as Wade ages and begins to question the image of girlhood her mother painted for her.

The idea of presentation is key in this book, as Wade writes several parables that play at the border of fiction and non-fiction. In one parable, she explores the word “waffle”; it is both a classic American breakfast, a symbol of the American family and a verb which means to go back and forth. Wade begins to consider how she hides parts of herself, using the waffle as a symbol. In some moments she is herself, and in others she allows her parents' idea of her to consume her identity.



Wade's femininity is put on display in the collection. In one particularly gruesome image, her mother kneels over her daughter's exposed back with a bottle of astringent and cotton swabs, trying to make her pores smaller, so that Wade might be more beautiful. Wade recalls candlelit baths and other exercises in beauty, like her mother's careful pruning of the garden. Like their lawn, it was essential that Wade be a symbol of the family's togetherness, their ability to cultivate beauty, poise, and peace in a chaotic world.

As the memoir continues and Wade grows older, she begins to find herself outside the limits of her mother's ideas of beauty. She questions gender norms, experimenting with her own sexuality—an act that leads to the eventual estrangement of Wade from her family when she comes out as a lesbian. Questioning other elements of her upbringing—religion, social class, and appearances—Wade soon finds that her idea of self and the idea that her parents insisted upon are deeply incompatible.

The memoir shares hundreds of small and large moments that contribute to the estrangement of a family and Wade's own discovery of self, of love, and of joy.



Julie Marie Wade is the author of more than a half-dozen books of non-fiction and poetry. Born in Seattle, Washington, she received an MFA and PhD, teaching in the creative writing program at Florida International University. She has received a number of awards, including two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prizes, an Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council, the American Literary Review Nonfiction Prize, the Chicago Literary Award in Poetry, the Gulf Coast Nonfiction Prize, the Oscar Wilde Poetry Prize, and others. Her books include Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures, Tremolo, SIX: Poems, and Same-Sexy Marriage, among other books.