This is a daughter's story. In Small Fires, Julie Marie Wade recreates
the landscape of her childhood with a lacemaker's care, then turns that
precise attention on herself. There are floating tea lights in the bath,
coddled blossoms in the garden, and a mother straddling her teenage
daughter's back, astringent in hand, to better scrub her
not-quite-presentable pores. And throughout, Wade traces this lost world
with the same devotion as her mother among her award-winning roses.
Small Fires is essay as elegy, but it is also essay as parsing,
reconciliation, and celebration, all in the attempt to answer the
question--what have you given up in order to become who you are?