If you had told the teenage Jaquira Díaz she would one day write and publish a memoir praised by such luminaries as Sandra Cisneros and Julia Alvarez, she would never have believed you.

“To imagine this life today, it would have seemed impossible,” she says. “I’d have said, ‘That’s someone else’s life.’ I’m incredibly grateful and feel very lucky. It’s taken a lot of hard work to get here, but it still feels like I’m living a dream.”

The memoir is Ordinary Girls (Algonquin, Oct. 29), a potent scream of a book about Díaz’s troubled childhood and adolescence in Puerto Rico and Miami Beach, as well as her fractured relationships with her family, in particular her schizophrenic mother. Ordinary Girls tells a story about what it means to be poor and immigrant, young and female, brown and queer; to face uncertainty and physical violence, to be a prisoner to a mother’s addictions and illness, to be one of the girls “who were escaping their own lives, trading the chaos of home for the chaos on the streets.”

The book reveals a gritty Miami Beach unlike the usual slick images of sun, fun and Art Deco charm. In Puerto Rico, Díaz and her family lived in a government housing project. In Miami Beach, her parents split, and she lived in a series of ratty apartments and hotels, pulled between her mother and father, worlds away from high-rise condos with ocean views.

“It felt necessary to portray the real Miami Beach,” Díaz says. “It felt ugly and beautiful, dirty and glamorous. I wanted to show the duality of the city and the immigrant experience. We were stripped of our language at school, but we spoke Spanish at home. People from Puerto Rico and Haiti and Venezuela and Cuba were doctors and lawyers and professors at home, but in Miami Beach they were driving taxis and cleaning hotel rooms and parking cars, struggling to pay the rent.”

At 11, Díaz tried to commit suicide for the first time, washing down a handful of her mother’s drugs—“antipsychotics, sleeping pills, anxiety pills”—with Dawn dishwashing liquid. By middle school, she already felt alien.

“We wore short shorts and crop tops, baggy jeans and basketball jerseys, big hoop earrings,” she writes. “Everybody had opinions about how we dressed, called us tomboys or hood rats or fast girls. Our shorts were too short, our jeans too tight, too baggy, our voices too loud. Everybody wanted to control what we wore, what we did, who we did it with.”

Díaz would not be controlled and remained defiant in the face of every threat. She was raped. Her brother tried to strangle her; she stabbed him with a steak knife. She joined a gang and ended up in juvenile detention. Eventually, she joined the military, but even that family proved less than a safe haven.

Díaz’s story is unimaginable for anyone who grew up in comfortable security. But writing Ordinary Girls made her realize how familiar her experience was.

“So many of us have gone through similar things,” says Díaz, a visiting assistant professor in the MFA program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It turns out I wasn’t just writing about myself. I was speaking to something larger. That’s the kind of writer I want to be now: I will always aspire to speak to something larger, to say something about more than just myself.”

But for all its painful universality and compassionate examination of the vulnerability of girlhood, Ordinary Girls is also a mother and daughter story, one Díaz struggled to tell.

“The hardest thing about writing about my mother was seeing her clearly,” she says. “It took a long time to get someplace where I could write about her. When I first started writing the essays that turned into this book, a friend of mine in a writing workshop read five chapters and said, ‘Where’s your mother? Why isn’t your mother in these pages?’ I’d written about years of my life without even mentioning her….It was very painful to look at her and see her clearly and think about the person she really was before and after her illness.”

Setting aside her shame at her past and her anger at her mother not only led to Ordinary Girls but also to a reconciliation.

“My mother and I are close now,” she says. “She’s not often lucid, but we have a loving relationship. I was only able to write about her after forgiving her.”

Connie Ogle is a writer in Florida.