The acclaimed and groundbreaking memoir from Wendy C. Ortiz. Originally published in 2014, reissued by Northwestern University Press in April 2025.
A darkly vibrant and daring memoir, Wendy C. Ortiz’s Excavation challenged the standard telling of abuse narratives when first published in 2014; over a decade later, it remains deeply prescient. Set in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley in the late 1980s, the narrative follows the spiraling entanglement between Wendy and her eighth-grade English teacher as she becomes both victim to and participant in a simultaneously predatorial and impassioned relationship. Baited by initial praise and a false sense of control, Wendy tumbles into a dangerous dynamic that spans the duration of her teens. Artfully constructed from her own journals and decades of personal excavation, the story of this secret relationship has imprinted on Wendy and readers alike. A stunningly honest look at memory, agency, and power, Excavation will claim your whole heart.
“Wendy C. Ortiz is an essential chronicler of queer embodiment, dreams, and the ways that place and perspective create us. What a treasure to be gifted these bold and lyrical modern classics in updated form.”
—Melissa Febos, national bestselling author of Girlhood, Body Work, and The Dry Season
“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 Black, author of The Still Point of the Turning World
“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 an illuminating book; one that resonates deeply with the teenage girl I once was, and one that saddens me as the mother I am now.”
—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
Review of Excavation in Los Angeles Review of Books
Los Angeles Times profile by Hector Tobar
Press Play interview with Madeleine Brand for KCRW, August 2014
BEYOND THAT: Wendy C. Ortiz In Conversation with Laura Jean Moore in The Brooklyn Rail
Excavation is a recommended book by the Booksmith at SFGate
Review of Excavation in ZYZZYVA
Jessica Machado interviews Wendy about Excavation in The Rumpus
Review of Excavation in The California Journal of Women Writers by Nidia K. Flores
Review by Myriam Gurba for RADAR Productions blog
Lauren Eggert-Crowe in Conversation with Wendy C. Ortiz in Midnight Breakfast