This is writing that sounds great when read aloud, which is alarming, given the measure of its content and the weight of its impact. Excavation is crafted to be effortless, eyes racing over the page, caught up in prose easily attributed to the language of one specific, articulate teenager, prose that reads like poetry in its fluidity. In the end, it took me about three weeks to read Excavation cover to cover it took eight months to process it enough to get past saving an empty word document. I felt guilty for liking Excavation, guilty for being swept up by Wendy and Jeff and Nicholas and Veronica, guilty for not being able to give them my undivided attention. If only I wasn’t feeling so shitty about everything, I thought, I’d have this read by now. Her style is easy and accessible, and without all of my emotional baggage I saw myself flying through the book.

Ortiz writes about herself and for herself, for her former self and her present self and everything she lost and gained from knowing Mr Ivers. And Excavation bled into this, My Girl bled into this, every crush on an older man, a high school teacher, a friend’s older brother, an older cousin’s friend bled into this and what could have been, this and what was. I felt carved up, learning about these men back in the States, most of whom I had trusted and thought I had known, and the personal stories of women coming forward, some far younger than the men they had trusted and thought they had known. So I sat and I read and I kept reading, but it was hard and slow going. And then, the same week I sat down to read Ortiz’s memoir, someone back in the States whom I care for quite a bit had stepped forward and named a mutual online friend in a string of revealed sexual offenders in our community. I had only just returned to New Zealand from a trip to the United States, where had seen old friends from the Internet and made some new ones. I sat on a couch in the lounge, reading in the sun while my friends watched My Girl. Ortiz’s Excavation: A Memoir, I was living in a house at the top of a hill overlooking the harbor.

Excavation ortiz