A cup of water under my bed

In 1980, a little girl in New Jersey is sent to English classes. Her teachers, her parents and her tias expect her to become white, the way the Italian families around her have. She is the daughter of a Colombian mother and a Cuban father, and she does not fit the box the world has ready for her.

This is the memoir of Daisy Hernández, told through her rebellions against, and negotiations with, the women who raised her. Her path runs from learning English to coming out as bisexual. It continues to a reporting internship at the New York Times, which she starts just as the paper is shaken by its biggest plagiarism scandal.

The book is a work of non-fiction about growing up where sexuality, immigration, race and class overlap in private life. Hernández traces the lessons the women around her passed on about money, love, sex and race. She sets out to show how those lessons from home can be carried into a new, queer life.

It reads as a personal, family-centred account rather than a reported study, and it is framed as a daughter's cuento, a story passed down and reshaped.