How maybe I wouldn’t be here if Grandma Mercy hadn’t threatened to have him thrown in jail. Sometimes when I write this story, I think of my mother as the villain, tricking my father, knowing the exact time my grandma Mercy would come home from work, leaving the bedroom door unlocked, forcing him to become a husband, a father, when what he really wanted was to read books and write poems and save the world.

My mother-so young, so desperate to leave her abusive mother, so in love with my father- would’ve done anything to keep him. My father had been a college activist, protesting the naval occupation of Culebra, studying literature,writing poems about American colonialism in Puerto Rico. My mother says he didn’t really find out until they were applying for their marriage license a week later, when he finally got a look at her birth date. My father says he didn’t know my mother’s real age, that she’d told him she was eighteen, that he found out only when Mercy caught them in bed. She had always looked older, my mother, and by the time she was fourteen, Grandma Mercy was already leaving her to care for two of her sisters, twelve-year-old Xiomara and one-year-old Tanisha, while she was at work. The first time she saw my father, my mother knew he was hers. We're pleased to present an excerpt from this important work. In her scorching new memoir Ordinary Girls ( out now from Algonquin Books), author Jaquira Diaz takes on the coming-of-age story from her unique, queer Puerto Rican perspective - tackling racial and sexual identity, domestic abuse, poverty, mental health, drug abuse, suicide, and much more.

Ordinary Girls by Jaquira Díaz