Wade's self-aware, grief-inflected essays attempt to answer the question?what have you given up in order to become who you are?
"Reckoning with imperfect parents-what they owe us and what we owe them-is one of the chief tasks of these essays, which form a kind of pointillistic autobiography. Another is the construction of memories, even imagined, in which understanding and forgiveness trump judgment and hate."
-Kate Tuttle, Boston Globe
"Small Fires is intelligent and elegant, shocking and saddening, heartfelt and hopeful."
-Cindy Wolfe Boynton, Minneapolis Star Tribune
"In Small Fires, Julie Marie Wade. . . considers family and memory with a poetic eye and unabashed tongue. With her carefully chosen words and a studied deliberateness, Wade proves unafraid to delve into her past-to skillfully reconstruct the events of her youth, from the horrifying to the sentimental to the self-conscious and beyond. . . . Small Fires is Julie Marie Wade's story, but the collection opens onto something universal-how we individuate from our family, how we become ourselves, what we carry forward from our pasts and make our own."
-Sarah Rauch, Lambda Literary
"Julie Marie Wade is an intelligent and nuanced writer in whose competent hands the tired old tale of the broken family is invigorated and renewed. I don't really care whether this book will be called a memoir, a group of lyric essays, or a bunch of nonfiction prose-poems. Whatever it's called, it is exquisitely made and cuts right to the heart."
-Rebecca Brown
