Class and social structure and what binds us together
“The Story of Us,” the dazzling new novel from writer and playwright Catherine Hernandez, beguiles (and puzzles) from its very first sentences. “Hello? Hi. Liz? Can you hear me? Can you see me if you look into my eyes?”
The speaker and prospective listener are unidentified, their relationship undefined, but the sentences speak of a longing to connect. The next sentence turns any expectations on their head: “See the spirit in this infant body?”
It’s an opening difficult to resist and sets the reader up perfectly for the book to follow: “The Story of Us” is narrated by a voice within a child in its first days of life, guided by a sense of urgency. “The former me, the real me, is fading by the second,” the narrator informs, “and there are things I remember, at this very moment and never will again, that I need to share with you.”
Those “things” the narrator remembers are, largely, the story of Mary Grace, their mother, whose life the narrator has experienced directly and from within. “I have lived for years as a seed in the ovaries of my mother while my mother gestated in the body of my Lola Daning. I was a dream of a dream, a nesting doll of possibility.”
This presence affords the narrator (I’m not being intentionally coy; the full identity of the narrator isn’t revealed until the novel’s final pages) a unique perspective on Mary Grace’s journey. Born in San Marcelino, Philippines, in 1972, MG lived through the eruption of Mount Pinatubo and, in the economic upheaval that followed, joined the Filipina diaspora, moving first to Hong Kong, then to Canada, to work as a nanny and to send funds home for her husband and extended family. Eventually, the plan goes, she will be able to sponsor her husband for Canadian immigration.
In her work, both fiction and drama, Hernandez has long demonstrated an unflinching connection with the real world, from the coming-of-age stories in her 2017 novel “Scarborough” (which was adapted for film in 2021 and was a Canada Reads title in 2022) to the persecution and devastation of the dystopian near-future in 2020’s “Crosshairs.” In “The Story of Us,” Hernandez depicts MG’s struggles, and the world of domestic work, with a sharp eye and a heartbreaking verisimilitude.
The early parts of “The Story of Us” are a riveting novel of class and social structures, betrayal and wage slavery, vividly depicted from the underside of glamour and money.
Everything changes when, in desperation for a new position, MG plucks a discarded Help Wanted ad from a garbage can. That’s how MG, and the narrator, meet Liz and are welcomed into a family that they never could have previously imagined. From there, “The Story of Us” blossoms in an entirely new direction, toward intentional family, the shifting of social norms and the commonality of all of those scorned by society, whether it be for race, gender or sexuality.
“The Story of Us” is a novel that is at once bold and ambitious, while simultaneously hushed and intimate. It’s emotionally bare and astute, and frequently funny and utterly human, a reminder of the bonds that hold us, over generations and across cultures.