We all need to be thinking about the decolonization of travel writing, and how certain places, their economies, their culture are affected by tourism. The travel space is easy to criticize for a similar lack of diversity. Part of why you wanted to write this book was because you hadn't seen a lot of stories about someone like you. And these are in so many ways the women who saved me, who kept me alive. Because the women who had been the girls in my youth are now these seemingly ordinary women who raise children and go to work, and come home and watch TV and clean their homes, and just live these very ordinary lives. The rejection of being an ordinary girl was more like embracing this version of the girl, the delinquent, that they expected me to be.Īs I got older, it felt very much again like being an ordinary girl was okay. I don't want to say that it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, but when I first started getting arrested and getting in trouble I felt like teachers and cops expected that out of me.

That changed as I became a teenager, when an ordinary girl was the worst possible thing you could be. The thing I wanted most was to stop being so hyper-visible. As a kid, I didn't fit into anyone's definition of girlhood, and I felt like an outsider in every single one of my relationships, in school, everywhere.

In the book, the definition for what an ordinary girl is moves in a circular motion. Trying to interpret how the world sees you comes up often throughout the book, as you wrestle with whether or not you’re an “ordinary girl”, as you say.

Ordinary Girls by Jaquira Díaz