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Table of Contents
About the Book
An intimate memoir of loss and reclamation, and a love letter to Guam, from former The Atlantic editor and journalist Lenika Cruz.
Every child growing up on the island of Guam learns the legend of Sirena. As the story goes, there was once a girl who loved the ocean so much, she would ignore her mother and her chores to play in the water. One day, as punishment for her disobedience, she was cursed to become a mermaid. No longer human but a creature of the sea, Sirena roamed the depths of the western Pacific alone, never to see her home or family again.
Lenika Cruz is another island daughter who knows loss. The story of her ancestors—indigenous Chamorro, Filipino, Okinawan—spans millennia, from ancient history to the Spanish galleon trade and colonization through Japanese occupation and American militarization from World War II to the present. After Lenika loses her mother as a child, her father moves the family back to Guam, knowing that he would have a village—abundant with love—to help raise his two young girls. But when he remarries shortly afterwards, love begins to take on new meanings: in Lenika’s mind, cruelty masquerades as care; affection requires pain, submission, and self-erasure. Under the influence of her new stepmother, Lenika eventually severs ties with Guam and her father to live as a “normal” American teenager in Southern California. Yet will life on the mainland be all that it promises to be? Or will the glittering illusion of freedom ultimately spell her doom?
Unfurling the layers of oppression and the insidious myths that have shaped her life, her identity, and her understandings of power and family, Lenika must revisit the land and waters, the indigenous history, practices, and language, including the story of Sirena, in order to confront painful truths. This is a powerful memoir of love, liberation, and transformation—of losing yourself and then trying to find your way back.
Every child growing up on the island of Guam learns the legend of Sirena. As the story goes, there was once a girl who loved the ocean so much, she would ignore her mother and her chores to play in the water. One day, as punishment for her disobedience, she was cursed to become a mermaid. No longer human but a creature of the sea, Sirena roamed the depths of the western Pacific alone, never to see her home or family again.
Lenika Cruz is another island daughter who knows loss. The story of her ancestors—indigenous Chamorro, Filipino, Okinawan—spans millennia, from ancient history to the Spanish galleon trade and colonization through Japanese occupation and American militarization from World War II to the present. After Lenika loses her mother as a child, her father moves the family back to Guam, knowing that he would have a village—abundant with love—to help raise his two young girls. But when he remarries shortly afterwards, love begins to take on new meanings: in Lenika’s mind, cruelty masquerades as care; affection requires pain, submission, and self-erasure. Under the influence of her new stepmother, Lenika eventually severs ties with Guam and her father to live as a “normal” American teenager in Southern California. Yet will life on the mainland be all that it promises to be? Or will the glittering illusion of freedom ultimately spell her doom?
Unfurling the layers of oppression and the insidious myths that have shaped her life, her identity, and her understandings of power and family, Lenika must revisit the land and waters, the indigenous history, practices, and language, including the story of Sirena, in order to confront painful truths. This is a powerful memoir of love, liberation, and transformation—of losing yourself and then trying to find your way back.
About the Author
Photograph © Lenika Cruz
Lenika Cruz is a former senior editor at The Atlantic, where she covered culture for ten years. She is also the author of the essay collection On BTS: Pop Music, Fandom, Sincerity. She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of California, Riverside, where she taught creative writing.
Product Details
- Publisher: Atria Books (May 4, 2027)
- Length: 320 pages
- ISBN13: 9781668050989
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Raves and Reviews
"Lenika Cruz writes with poetry and passion about grief, shame, and the pull of the homes we leave behind. Saltwater Dreaming is a touching and sensitive memoir of loss."
—Laila Lalami, bestselling author of The Dream Hotel
"Saltwater Dreaming: The Making of an Island Daughter is an astounding story about a young woman turning her intelligent and compassionate gaze on her family’s history and homeland, in search of answers about what it means to arrive at home. Told with elegance and a journalist’s precision, Lenika Cruz weaves a tale like no other that spans multiple generations and examines colonialism and its reverberations, exploring how we are bound by history, duty and love to family and place, despite the hurt they may have once wrought. Readers will be captivated by Cruz's deft portrayals of home, figurative and literal, as we are taken through Guam, California and Okinawa. I will be thinking of Saltwater Dreaming and Cruz's unmatched grace and empathy on the page for years to come. This is a memoir for anyone who has ever longed for safety and belonging, and it delivers a stunning, powerful sense of reclamation — something that for many of us remains but a dream."
—Kat Chow, author of Seeing Ghosts
"On the very first page of her memoir, Lenika Cruz vows never again to be the daughter who shows up empty-handed. She need not worry. This book is an offering. A beautiful telling of terrible truths, Saltwater Dreaming is a deeply personal reckoning with a painful past—not only hers, but ours. All of us who call the colony of Guam home, all of us who are marked by that inheritance. I know her opening scene by heart—cleaning her mother’s grave and adorning it with flowers—and not just because my own father is buried in the same cemetery. In Guam, we are always coming back from burying the dead. But this book is teeming with more than ghosts. It is teeming with love."
—Julian Aguon, author of No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies
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