Hernandez, Daisy. A Cup of Water Under My Bed. Beacon Press, 2014. ISBN 9780807014486
Plot
The story begins when she is five years old (child of Cuban father and Colombian mother) enrolled in Catholic school in New Jersey. She chronicles feeling different by her predominantly white peers, since she only spoke Spanish. Hernandez parents were religious, but their beliefs came not from their lives in America, rooted in their home countries, where a combination of Indigenous and African influences the communities, also seen with people practicing Catholicism. As the family assimilates, so does Hernandez and expresses her comfort writing in English and the loss she experiences in this knowing. She goes into family issues and feelings around her sexuality to finally coming out as a bisexual woman, and the ways her family treated her different due to this, and how her work experiences are mainly different that of her coworkers due to beliefs around welfare reform, and the like.
Critical Evaluation
Themes in Hernandez' memoir is assimilation, making sense of being both from Latin America and appreciation for expressing herself in English (preferred language to write in), feeling different at school when she was a child, to her experiences at work, assimilation and straddling English and Spanish, was a place that was uncomfortable and a middle ground of existing between two cultures she was often in throughout a child and young adult. She tackles the subjects of sexuality, money, love, family expectations surrounding heterosexual relationships. It is an empowering story, of taking her story and telling it from Hernandez vantage point. It flows well, and one can relate to the characters, both the parents and Hernandez. There is a poetic flow to her writing that although not prose or in verse, has the feel of it, so those that have an affinity for this style would love the book.
Reader's Annotation
Memoir of a young Cuban-Colombian American coming of age in New Jersey relationships with family, love, sexuality and navigating both cultures and being true to herself.
Author Information
Daisy Hernández is the author of The Kissing Bug: A True Story of an Insect, a Family and a Nation's Neglect of a Deadly Disease. She is also the author of the award-winning memoir A Cup of Water Under My Bed and coeditor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism. The former editor of ColorLines magazine, she has reported for National Geographic, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Slate, and she has written for NPR's All Things Considered and CodeSwitch.
Her essays and fiction have appeared in Aster(ix), Bellingham Review, Brevity, Dogwood, Fourth Genre, Gulf Coast, Iowa Review, Juked, and Rumpus among other journals. A contributing editor for the Buddhist magazine Tricycle, Daisy is an Associate Professor in the Creative Writing Program at Miami University in Ohio.
Source: https://www.daisyhernandez.com/about
Genre
Non-fiction: Memoir
BookTalking Ideas
"Over and over again, this truth: Writing is how I leave my family and how I take them with me." - I will dive into this quote and ask about perspectives on what she may have meant to the eyes of those that read it.
Reading Level/Age Interest
Ages 14+
Challenge Issues
Sex. Pleasure. LGBTQ+ I will defend it with the Library Bill of Rights and Los Angeles County Library Collection Policy.
Why I Included This Book in Collections
Author Interview: 'Kissing Bug' Tells A Personal Story About Race, Sexuality and A Deadly Insect
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