This inventive and affecting collection of speculative short stories takes on a wide range of themes, from the power that secrets can hold over us, to the long–and sometimes fraught–reach of motherly love, to the ways we learn to live with loss. The author explores these themes with insight, and a generous dose of humor.
In “My First Confession,” a consummate outsider and loner becomes a first-hand witness to the very definition of an insider event: a secretive initiation ritual at one of her college’s sororities. That outsider is Eva Alvarez, who reflects that “[i]n two years, I hadn’t joined anything but the school newspaper.”
Eva becomes interested in the initiation ritual when a member of the sorority, Vanessa, tells her about a mysterious book that’s part of the ritual. To help sate Eva’s curiosity about the book, Vanessa invites her to a meeting where the book, and the ritual surrounding it, will be discussed. At the meeting, Eva learns these details:
Hoping for a scoop for the school newspaper, Eva fibs that she wants to join the sorority. Consequently, she becomes not just a witness to but also a participant in the initiation ritual. After watching a number of “floral dresses” write their secrets in the book, Eva takes her turn and ends up breaking one of the ritual’s rules. Not wanting to give too much away, I’ll just say that from here, things take an unexpected and unsettling turn for everyone present, including Eva. The events at the end of the story make painfully clear the power that secrets can hold over us, and they show how our sense of self can become intertwined with what we choose to reveal–or conceal–from others.
“Ashes to Ashes” explores another uncomfortable situation, one that deteriorates over the course of the story, in a darkly comical way. At the start of the story, the protagonists, Nina and Bryan, are on the brink of what would seem to be a happy event: an engagement to be married. Yet things seem to go wrong from the start, when Bryan gives Nina an engagement ring that had belonged to his late mother. “She would have wanted me to give it to you,” he tells her.
But Nina is disappointed in the ring–it isn’t at all what she’d had in mind. Still, she decides to keep her mouth shut. However, she doesn’t remain silent about a pilly old sweater of Bryan’s that she’d like him to toss. In refusing her request, he explains, “My mom knit it for me.”
As it turns out, Bryan and Nina aren’t the only witnesses to this exchange. Bryan’s late mother, Janet, is watching–and judging–from the urn containing her ashes, which Bryan has displayed prominently in the couple’s condo. At one point, Janet makes this observation from her perch:
When Janet begins to speak to Nina from the urn, offering advice and criticism, things escalate in a way that’s both hilarious and relatable. For all this story’s magical elements, it gets at a real-world truth: that parental influences, preferences, and opinions can have a long and lasting reach, for good or ill.
(Another story in the collection, “Motherworld,” also offers a darkly humorous take on mothering. In this story, the protagonist orders an AI-based mother figure who can be tailored to her needs. She hopes to receive a mother’s care and kindness, nothing more. But as she eventually discovers, mothering is a far more complicated enterprise: The strings of attachment pull both ways, sometimes uncomfortably.)
The beautifully mythical story “The Seal Queen” also explores the bonds between mothers and their children, but it has a more bittersweet tone. At the start of the story, a grandmother, Ana, is telling her granddaughter what at first seems to be a sort of fairy tale. But in time, it appears that the story is Ana’s own.
The young mother in the fairy-tale-like story, also named Ana, has two daughters and a son, Nicolas, and they summer at a cottage by the sea. The shore where they live is often visited by a group of seals, Ana’s favorite being “a smooth silvery gray” one. Her brother-in-law, Gus, calls this seal the Seal Queen. Though Ana’s husband dismisses the story surrounding the Seal Queen as nonsense, Gus goes on to tell it. In short, the Seal Queen is said to come ashore at night as a beautiful woman, and she is bent on stealing human children–a form of vengeance against townsmen who attacked a pod of seals years before, killing her pup.
In lyrical, haunting prose, Romero describes how Nicolas becomes a tragic part of the Seal Queen’s legend. When, years later, Ana discovers that he hasn’t vanished for good, the happiness of this discovery is bittersweet, and brief. Ana’s tale, and its telling, make clear the lasting effects of a deep loss, and the importance of sharing the memories of lost loved ones through stories.
One of my favorite stories in the collection, “You Are Approaching Your Destination,” gives a humorous and moving take on the afterlife–or more specifically, on a state of uncertainty that, for some characters in this story, exists between death and the next world, whatever that may be. The state of uncertainty features those who wander the world as they’d known it (unaware that they’re dead, or troubled by unfinished business) and those who pick up the wanderers in an Uber-ish way and help them to their next destination. When the story’s central character, Alex, finds herself in this eerily familiar yet strange world, a beloved grandmother, and also a stranger, help her start to make sense of things and come to a peace about the life, and a love, she’s leaving behind. Like all the stories in We Have Always Been Who We Are, “You Are Approaching Your Destination” is as insightful as it is entertaining.
Though the stories in this collection may be fantastical, they never lose sight of the all-too-real emotions at the core of loss, love, and the countless conflicts, both internal and external, that so many of us face. We Have Always Been Who We Are is a deeply affecting–and enjoyable–read.
Would My Pick be Your Pick?
If you're interested in ________, the answer may be "Yes":￭ Speculative fiction
￭ Short stories
￭ Fiction with a Latina perspective
￭ Fairy tales or myths
