He notices Wendy when her own parents do not.

Ivers has a highly-attuned sense of smell. Unfortunately for Ortiz, predators can sniff out girls like she once was-girls who come from broken homes where Mom is “despicable with drink,” Dad is an “occasional apparition,” and “I love you” is something you say “to the sidewalk” (30, 141, 63). Predators can sniff out girls like she once was-girls who come from broken homes where Mom is “despicable with drink,” Dad is an “occasional apparition,” and “I love you” is something you say “to the sidewalk.” As predators go, Mr. She has been marked, and it will take decades to excavate the hurt-to free “her body from the bitumen” (234). She compares the purple of concealed hickeys to flowers: “A small field of hickeys hid like violets under my t-shirt,” she says, thinking back on an afternoon romp with her former teacher. But Ortiz is sure to convey said undoing beautifully. All too soon, “the fevered rub of hips against the floor, the burn of carpet through clothes, the clenching of toes” will mean young Wendy’s undoing (29). All too soon, he’ll be “pressing his hardness against and licking thighs, then clit” (23). Pages later, his eyes meet hers, and a thirteen-year-old Wendy is biting her lip (15).

“Chalk dust scattered away from him like an aura,” she writes (11). It is by way of simile that Ortiz introduces us to the man who strips her of her naiveté. Whether it’s the temporal distance that gives her this perspective (a forty-something Ortiz is far from her adolescent self) or her background in psychology (she holds an MA in clinical psychology), we the readers relish the connections she deftly makes and the brave insights she offers through the hindsight perspective and a strategic sampling of literary devices. Ortiz’s writing is rife with figurative language like simile, metaphor, personification, parallel structure, alliteration, and repetition, but it is also incredibly self-reflective. Ortiz writes about her loss of innocence in her debut memoir Excavation, which has received rave reviews since its 2014 release.

Excavation ortiz