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Wendy C Ortiz
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Excavation: A Memoir Paperback – July 18, 2014

by Wendy C. Ortiz (Author)
4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 548 ratings
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Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Wendy C. Ortiz was an only child and a bookish, insecure girl living with alcoholic parents in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Her relationship with a charming and deeply flawed private school teacher fifteen years her senior appeared to give her the kind of power teenagers wish for, regardless of consequences. Her teacher—now a registered sex offender—continually encouraged her passion for writing while making her promise she was not leaving any written record about their dangerous sexual relationship. This conflicted relationship with her teacher may have been just five years long, but would imprint itself on her and her later relationships, queer and straight, for the rest of her life. In EXCAVATION: A MEMOIR, the black and white of the standard victim/perpetrator stereotype gives way to unsettling grays. The present- day narrator reflects on the girl she once was, as well as the teacher and parent she has become. It's a beautifully written and powerful story of a woman reclaiming her whole heart.
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  1. Print length
    235 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Future Tense Books
  4. Publication date
    July 18, 2014
  5. Dimensions
    5.5 x 0.75 x 8.25 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1892061708
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1892061706
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Excavation by Wendy C. Ortiz will change your life. Readers will find everything here: a gripping and necessary story, luminous writing and an utterly compelling heroine who is both generous and fierce. You will emerge changed, dazzled, energized, disbelieving and yet a believer. Most of all, read this book because, like all great literature, and especially the best memoirs, it will make you feel more alive."
--Emily Rapp, author of The Still Point of the Turning World and Poster Child

"The time has finally arrived when women are telling the truth--the hard truths, the messy, glorious, loud, tender, screeching corporeal truths--about their lives as they live them and not lived as we are asked to live them. Wendy C. Ortiz's writing will rearrange your DNA. Permanently, beautifully..."

--Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water and Dora: A Headcase

"It's rare to meet a memoirist who can write about the darkest things without judgment and emotional simplification. Wendy C. Ortiz is that kind of writer, and Excavation is a book that's devastating, funny, tough, broken, and achingly clear all at the same time."

--Paul Lisicky, author of The Burning House and Lawnboy

"A raw, unflinching memoir, beautifully told, Excavation is a portrait of all that roils beneath the teenage surface, a reminder of the secrets that any kid might be hiding. Ortiz is a fearless and generous storyteller, peeling back the layers of memory, exploring her parents' alcoholism and her years-long illicit relationship with a teacher, never slipping into the easy traps of sentimentality or self-pity. This is a brave, illuminating book..."

--Cari Luna, author of The Revolution of Every Day

"Excavation stopped my heart. Its story is vital, cracking open a dialogue about what we keep secret and how those secrets shape our lives. The narrative is direct and unflinching, pulling you, challenging you, the kind of read where you call in sick because ohmygod what happens next; but between those moments, Ortiz hits pause and looks back, allowing the reader to breathe with her, to reflect with her, to "wrestle with ghosts," in language so breathtakingly beautiful, so precise and poetic and true."

--Megan Stielstra, author of Once I Was Cool

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Future Tense Books (July 18, 2014)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 235 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1892061708
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1892061706
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8.8 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.75 x 8.25 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 548 ratings

About the author

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Wendy C Ortiz

Wendy C Ortiz

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Wendy C. Ortiz is the author of Excavation: A Memoir, Hollywood Notebook, and the dreamoir Bruja. In 2016 Bustle named her one of "9 Women Writers Who Are Breaking New Nonfiction Territory.” Her work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, The Rumpus, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the National Book Critics Circle Small Press Spotlight blog. Her writing has appeared in such venues as The New York Times, FENCE, Joyland, and a year-long series appeared at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Wendy lives in Los Angeles.

Visit her at www.wendyortiz.com or subscribe to her Substack Mommy's El Camino: https://wendycortiz.substack.com

Customer reviews

4 out of 5 stars
4 out of 5
548 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

HornFan2
5.0 out of 5 stars Read This because of My Dark Vanessa And Liked It
Reviewed in the United States on April 21, 2021
Verified Purchase
This was my first read by the author Wendy C. Ortiz, really liking this a lot, it's based on journals, well written based on that, it works, and the editing on it is perfect.

Definitely feel 'Excavation' handcuffed how 'My Dark Vanessa' could be written, presented, you have way too many similarities for any reader not too realize this and man can Wendy write.

Even using old journals, can Wendy ever write, she sucks you in, grabs your full attention, keeps you reading, it's intense, your worried for her and it's a believable story. Her parents don't get along, even get divorced, she's desperate for love and attention, ends up getting involved with her teacher, although she does have other boyfriends, girlfriends and just wish the ending was better.

Getting back to the, too many similarities, you have 10 that I've listed, sure I missed a few and feel like the author had every right to speak up about, 'My Dark Vanessa' being to similar.

1) English Teacher
2) 13 and 15 years old
3) Beards and Glasses
4) Lolita
5) Drinking and Pot
6) Stephen King
7) Music
8) Montana
9) Oral sex
10) The relationship involving the teacher

Definitely will keep reading from the author Wendy C. Ortiz, would recommend this one.
4 people found this helpful
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Anon.
4.0 out of 5 stars A Complex Survivor's Story.
Reviewed in the United States on December 19, 2021
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Wendy Ortiz pulls no punches in this autobiographical account of a five year long affair she had with her junior high school English teacher, starting when she was just 13 years old. The complexity of fear-love-desire-overwhelm that inevitably comes with adolescent love under the BEST and most appropriate circumstances gets cranked to maximum when young Ortiz finds herself having to navigate all of that along with the paranoia, dizzyingly treacherous power dynamics and enforced secret-keeping that's just part of the scenery in many statutory situations that echo this one. Thrown into the mix is a dysfunctional homelife that makes obvious both how such a relationship could've gone on for so long with no one a jot the wiser, and also gives important clues as to why Ortiz would've been attracted to such a fraught dynamic to begin with.
Given the depth of these layers, there were aspects of the narrative that felt rushed through or too condensed. Coming in at just over 200 pages, this book could easily have had another 50 or 100 to expand more deeply and intimately on what exactly was happening. I was left with the distinct feeling that Ortiz wanted to hurry along some painful parts and just get back to the bits that felt safer or easier, but by doing so, some of the profundity of the experience feels lost.
Ortiz' writing style is verbose and poetic, sometimes used to great effect, as when we get to see glimpses of her sweeter coming-of-age passages, hanging out with her lifelong friends, falling in love, listening to music and getting high. But the writing sometimes works against the flow, and I'm continually given the sense that she couldn't make up her mind about HOW to relay this story: from a place of a fully-grown person looking back on a part of her coming-of-age story, with all the wisdom the ensuing years have granted? Or from the perspective of what it was like to actually inhabit that adolescent self, which strives SO. MUCH. to be taken seriously while having *massive* blindspots about her own naiveté. Her voice vacillates between the two, but it's clear that it's not intentional and the result made the narrative muddy in spots. (The editing did no favors in this regard, and there were sloppy sentences and syntax errors that should've been removed on a first read-through.)
Despite the these critiques, the book is a compelling read and a fine addition to a growing genre of stories, both fiction and non-fiction, about these kinds of adolescent-adult relationships, which in recent years have been told from the perspective of the teenager in the story, a perspective long overdue.
This brings me to my final point, which has to do with the comparisons -whether warranted or not- between Ortiz's "Excavation" and Kate Elizabeth Russell's "My Dark Vanessa". It is my opinion that apart from the very obvious similarities, which you'd know just by reading the blurbs on the backs of each book -a teenage girl has a romantic/sexual relationship with one of her teachers at a private school- there's nothing in here that points to plagiarism, which is the word that was tossed as an accusation at Russell by Ortiz, although Ortiz stated she never actually read Russell's book, so, you know, that's something to keep in mind as well. But the particulars of the story are vastly different, from the home lives each of these people inhabit during their school years to how they approach their healing processes later on. Yes, both have time jumps, but in Ortiz' case, they function as a sort of "breaking the fourth wall", giving the reader direct insights into her later years' reckoning and naming her experiences, where Vanessa's time jumps show us less of her healing and instead more of the aftermath of living in the shadow of this person she loved and hated for so long.
Interestingly, there's MANY more similarities to be found between "Excavation" and Alisson Wood's "Being Lolita" which came out about 6 or 7 months *before* "My Dark Vanessa", so it's a bit of a puzzle as to why the derision came up specifically with Russell's book and not Wood's. Yes, it's true, Russell, a white author, got a massive deal for her title -and she also spent over a decade working on it (which means she'd already been writing it for three years before Ortiz's novel came out), with the book culminating as her graduate thesis work for her MFA in Creative Writing, and that quality shows in the craft of the story and the world-building therein.
Do publishers have a race problem? ABSOLUTELY. Do more writers of color -especially queer writers of color- need to be seen, read, published? You better believe it. But Kate Russell getting a great deal from an entirely different publisher for an exceptionally written novel has precious little to do with Ortiz getting her book published 7 years earlier by a smaller publishing house and all the monetary limitations that tends to imply.
But don't just read reviews- read both books and draw your own conclusions: at the end of the day, we need ALL survivor's stories to be told, whether they seemingly overlap or not.
13 people found this helpful
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Ani
3.0 out of 5 stars Author hasn’t seemed to heal
Reviewed in the United States on July 4, 2020
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As someone who has been there too, it doesn’t seem like she has fully healed from this. This is a very challenging type of abuse to navigate and heal from. I’ve read other books (My Dark Vanessa being the most recent and Casualties of Perfection being another) that touch on the same subject matter and do a much better job. This read like she was still a teenager, and maybe that’s her point. But even in her looking back moments, it doesn’t seem like she’s got an adult mindset about her trauma. In part of the book, she states what she would ask another girl going through it and the first question is how does he treat you? Hm. No. No matter how an adult teacher treats a young teen, a sexual relationship is not ok. The writing style was ok. Nothing poetic but easy to follow and picture. Over all, not a terrible book but for the subject matter I’m not sure it was done well.
12 people found this helpful
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars An amazing memoir for CNF lovers
Reviewed in the United States on August 30, 2016
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This book has been recommended to me countless times and I don't know what kept me from reading it for so long. This is definitely a stellar addition to the CNF genre and an important read. To excavate is to "unearth methodically in an attempt to discover information about the past" and that is exactly what Wendy C. Ortiz does. The timeline jumps around, so that you are simultaneously walking with Wendy, the young girl who is mixed up in a confusing relationship with her older teacher, and Wendy, the wise woman who has healed and seen the ways her past choices have manifested, disappeared, morphed, reinforced. It's fascinating. Do not expect a "how-I-survived" kind of book, replete with life lessons and inspiring scenes where she overcomes adversity. This is truly a digging up of the past, a careful laying out of all that transpired, an effort to make sense of the fossils and markings. It unfolds that way because life unfolds that way - we simply keep making mistakes until we stop. It doesn't happen in a flourish or flash of light. One day, we are better, and we're not quite sure how we got there, and that is the strength of Ortiz' storytelling - she wills us to grow up with her, unsure, but ultimately determined.
8 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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BoBo
2.0 out of 5 stars My Dark Vanessa
Reviewed in Mexico on April 16, 2022
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Leí este libro después de haber leído “My Dark Vanessa” para ver qué tanto había plagiado la segunda autora. La respuesta es cero.
Si te gusta leer “Memoirs” entonces este libro NO es para ti.
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Lauren Rasmussen
4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting but a little slow
Reviewed in Australia on October 11, 2020
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This was an interesting book and it was enjoyable in the beginning but it felt like the book and the relationship dragged on just far too long
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Ninaminacat
3.0 out of 5 stars Frank and open memoir
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 31, 2021
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I only discovered this memoir as a result of reading reviews of "My Dark Vanessa" when I had already finished that book. Wishing to judge for myself whether Kate Elizabeth Russell's 2020 novel was derived from Wendy Oritz's own experiences (published considerably beforehand in 2014), I was delighted to find that "Excavation" was available in Kindle Unlimited.

Having read both books, I personally feel that other than sharing the obvious theme of a teacher entering into a long-term inappropriate relationship with young school girl and the events bring recounted from the girl's viewpoint, there is little to connect the two. With that out of the way, here are my thoughts on Wendy Oritz's work.

I am afraid that I found the first 60% or so of the book very hard going - not because of the subject matter but the format. The book consists largely of Wendy's encounters with her teacher. This made (for me at least) for a rather disjointed read - like selected diary entries or a catalogue of their meetings. I think I would have made better progress with the book if I had felt that the relationship was set more firmly into the context of Wendy's life - and I certainly appreciated her openness about her feelings and fantasies. Once Wendy found a boyfriend and started to evaluate the two relationships, I found the book more satisfying. On a more general note, I very much liked the concept of Wendy "excavating" her life and thought that the setting for the ending was appropriate to the title and clever.

Above all, I am delighted to see that inspite of her difficult start in life (both from a family point of view and that of being sexually and emotionally abused), she had found her way into a stable loving relationship which has produced a daughter, and that she is now in a position to be able to help other through her work as a marriage and family therapist. Well done, Wendy, for finding your way.
3 people found this helpful
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Lola
2.0 out of 5 stars A bare memoir.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 19, 2020
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"Excavation" tells the story of the author's eighth-grade English teacher and how he began a sexual relationship with her, which would last five years. There is a lot of sex, drugs and music and while it might sound somewhat glamorous, it is not. It left me feeling dirty and a little bit confused as to why this short book is given such a high praise? As a true story of emotional abuse - would it require such high praise and why? Are we rating memories? Emotions? As a work of literature - it would certainly need more to be considered a good book.

I decided to read the book after "My Dark Vanessa", a book about the same subject and matter, which is currently everywhere and the author of which has been blamed of plagiarism. Did I see similarities? Yes. But - and I never thought I would say that - I preferred "My Dark Vanessa" as a reader.
6 people found this helpful
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