Latest news with #AmericanDirt
The Guardian
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
American Dirt author Jeanine Cummins: ‘I didn't need to justify my right to write that book'
When Jeanine Cummins logs in to our video call, I am surprised to see that the profile picture that pops up before her video loads is the Spanish-language cover of her book American Dirt. I had assumed, given the vitriol that novel attracted when it was published in 2020, that she would be trying to distance herself from it. For the first year after its publication, that was the case, she tells me from a light-filled, bookshelf-lined room in her New York home. 'My husband would ask me every week: 'Knowing what you know now, would you still write it?'' she says, and the answer was consistently: 'No, I would not.' Eventually that answer shifted to maybe, and now, five years on, the 50-year-old author is firmly at yes. 'I'm really glad I wrote that book,' she says. 'I'm proud of it. But having to endure the experience of publication, it was brutal.' American Dirt had been expected to be one of the buzziest books of 2020, having reportedly earned Cummins a seven-figure advance. Copies of the novel, about a mother and son fleeing a drug cartel in Mexico, arrived in bookshops emblazoned with a quote from the thriller writer Don Winslow, who called it 'a Grapes of Wrath for our times', and it was chosen as an Oprah's book club pick. 'The kind of praise that it got was so over the top,' Cummins says now. She wasn't used to the attention – her three previous books had not received anywhere near that level of hype – and she certainly wasn't prepared for what came next: a string of bad reviews, one calling the book 'trauma porn'. Whether Cummins had the right to tell the story of Mexican migrants, being neither Mexican nor a migrant herself, was called into question, and 141 writers signed a letter to Oprah Winfrey, asking her to remove it as a book club pick. None of this was helped by the way Cummins's publishers marketed the book, with barbed-wire centrepieces decorating a launch event, or the novel's author's note, which the writer now thinks opened the door to scrutiny. In it, Cummins, whose grandmother was Puerto Rican, wrote that she 'wished someone slightly browner than me' had written the novel, but added: 'if you're a person who has the capacity to be a bridge, why not be a bridge?' She also explained that her husband had been an undocumented immigrant in the US – but didn't mention that he was white, and that his country of origin was Ireland. 'I was trying to justify my right to write that book and I didn't need to justify it. It's a novel. I'm allowed to write it.' She will continue to write characters who share different experiences from her, she says, and 'would encourage every other writer out there to do the same', as long as they do so with tremendous care. It was her publisher who encouraged her to expand on the author's note, which in the original manuscript was a one-line statistic about the number of migrants who had died in the US-Mexico borderlands. Before the book was sold, when she was taking meetings with the numerous editors who were interested in buying it, 'every single one of them said: 'Why did you write this book? Why?'' She felt she was being pushed to come up with a personal link to the story, when really she was thinking, given what was going on at the border: 'Why isn't everyone writing this book?' Addressing 'this enormous humanitarian stain on our national conscience' was the real reason she wrote American Dirt, Cummins says – and the reason she remains proud of it. For her, it was 'a very personal book', because it was written just after her father died suddenly while out with friends. It was only later, after someone pointed it out to her, that she realised all the book's major characters are grieving for their fathers. 'So the notion that I was writing trauma porn or that I was unqualified to write about grief was really absurd,' she says. Much was made at the time of the fact that she had referred to herself as white in a 2015 New York Times opinion piece about the murder of two of her cousins, the subject of her first book, the memoir A Rip in Heaven. 'I have always been white. I will always be white,' she says now. 'I have always been Latina. I will always be Latina. Those things are not mutually exclusive. I couldn't believe that in 2020 I had to say Latino people come in different colours.' The question of which ethnic group the author belongs to is one that has come up throughout her life, and is a major theme in her latest novel, Speak to Me of Home, in some ways a product of her post-American Dirt 'soul-searching'. The intergenerational saga follows an Irish‑Puerto Rican family that closely reflects Cummins's own – nobody can this time accuse her of writing outside of her own experience. 'It's unassailable in that particular way, which is a comfort,' Cummins says, though 'that's not why I wrote it'. The character of Rafaela is partly based on Cummins's grandmother, who was born into a well-to-do family in Puerto Rico, a 'cherished and coddled oldest child' until her father 'lost everything' when she was a teenager, and she was sent to the US naval base in Trinidad to work. There, she met Cummins's grandfather, and the couple 'ended up in St Louis with eight kids'. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion At one point in the novel, Rafaela's husband is asked by the manager of a 'whites only' country club for proof that Rafaela is white. In the end, she is allowed to become a member, but must change in the staff locker room. 'That's a true story,' Cummins says – the same thing happened to her grandmother. Rafaela's children being banned from speaking Spanish at home in order to fit in better at school is also taken from real life – Cummins herself was only allowed to speak English at home. And like Rafaela's daughter Ruth, the writer felt like a fraud in all of the social groups at university, where everyone seemed to gravitate towards sororities or fraternities 'where everyone looked exactly like them'. Having grown up in Gaithersburg, Maryland, widely recognised as one of the most racially diverse US cities, Cummins was shocked by the way her fellow students at Towson University in Baltimore segregated themselves. 'I'll never forget being in the dining hall for the first time,' she says, where Black students were sitting in one room, white students in another. 'And then there were a few tables in the corner for whoever was Asian or Latino, not Afro-Latino. And I was like, where do I sit?' She and her boyfriend at the time, who was Black, tried to set up a club, 'Target Unity', with a view that it could be 'a social outlet where people could mix and mingle with people who were not from their same racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic background.' They rented a room in the student union, but 'no one came … no one wanted that'. Cummins went on to work in publishing for a decade, so she was 'acutely aware that publishing had a race problem', but it 'felt very weird' to be a focal point of that criticism – American Dirt sparked a wider global conversation about race and publishing, out of which the #DignidadLiteraria campaign for greater Latino representation in US publishing was launched. Now her feelings about the book are bittersweet. Commercially, American Dirt was a huge success, something the author wasn't able to feel excited about at first. She was 'relieved' rather than happy every week it continued to be a No 1 bestseller. Though she doesn't read media coverage or online reviews, occasionally her husband will send her a screenshot 'if there's something really lovely'. Yet so often these positive reviews 'are defending my right to author the book', she says, which she finds 'really bothersome'. When reviewers say things like 'it doesn't matter that she's not Latina', they are still viewing her identity differently from the way she identifies herself: Irish and Puerto Rican; white and Latina. 'The book won,' she says. 'It's sold three and a half million copies and continues to sell.' But 'in those moments, I realise I lost'. Speak to Me of Home by Jeanine Cummins is published by Tinder. To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Irish Times
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
American Dirt author Jeanine Cummins: ‘I felt like the entire world was against me but I knew I would emerge'
In 2020, after her book tour for American Dirt was cancelled owing to threats of violence, Jeanine Cummins found herself staying in the home of fellow author Ann Patchett, whose Nashville bookstore she had been visiting, and who thought it best she didn't stay in a hotel alone. As they tried to work out the best thing to quell the anxiety, the pair got talking about antidepressants. Cummins had once taken Lexapro, but didn't like how it made her feel. 'I didn't like that I didn't have access to the full range of my emotions,' she told the older author. And Patchett just looked at her, put a hand on one hip. 'Well,' she replied, wryly. 'Aren't you glad you have access to all of them now?' READ MORE The events surrounding publication of Cummins's third novel, American Dirt , are by now legend. First, the book sold in a multipublisher auction for a reported seven-figure sum. It was tipped as one of the hottest books of 2020 and chosen for Oprah's book club. For Cummins it was the kind of career jackpot most authors only ever dream of. But with the wave of good fortune came a tidal wave of backlash, when, in the fire cauldron of Trump's identity-politics-steeped US, she found herself at the centre of a debate over who gets to tell which stories. As a white American (her heritage is part-Irish, part-Puerto Rican), she was accused of cultural appropriation, insensitivity (an event that included barbed-wire flower arrangements caused especial furore), and of appropriating the work of Mexican authors. Many were also uncomfortable with an American being granted such a large sum for this Mexico-set story, when Mexican authors rarely if ever receive such large advances. With the online torrent reaching fever pitch, Cummins's extensive book tour was cancelled. Still, American Dirt went on to sell millions of copies, and was translated into 37 languages. [ 'It was a witch hunt': Jeanine Cummins's novel changed publishing. But not how she hoped Opens in new window ] 'My husband always says that it was like launching a cruise ship from the top of a cliff,' says Cummins when we meet in the Merrion Hotel in Dublin. 'It felt like winning the lottery until, all of a sudden, it wasn't. When it turned, it turned so quickly. It was like it curdled. And the experience of enduring the aftermath of the curdling was brutal.' She adds that the conversation over publishing's shortcomings were 'long overdue'. 'Should I have been the poster child for it? No.' Cummins appears, despite everything, happy and healthy as she sits in the outdoor terrace with large sunglasses on her face and her signature Latina-style hoop earrings hanging beneath her curls. We've met in the run-up to publication of her fourth novel, Speak to Me of Home, but she's also in Ireland on a family holiday – the aforementioned husband hails from Mayo, where the pair will spend some time, along with their teenage daughters, Aoife and Clodagh. 'I'm okay now,' she says of her mental state. 'It was not my first rodeo. It was not my first trauma. I've had lots of grief in my life, so I knew that I would emerge, somehow or another, from the other end of it. But in the moment, I felt like the entire world was against me.' [ Jeanine Cummins: 'I didn't know if I had the right to tell the story' Opens in new window ] The entire world with the exception of some crucial people, including Winfrey, who refused to capitulate to the pressure to withdraw her support for the book. 'Had she done that, I don't think I would be sitting here today – like, I don't think I would have been able to write another book,' says Cummins. Five years on the book she might not have written sits between us on the table. Speak to Me of Home is a family saga about three generations of women – Rafaela, who grew up in a wealthy family in Puerto Rico in the 1950s; her daughter Ruth, a social media influencer who moved to the US aged five; and Ruth's daughter, Daisy, who has returned to her ancestral homeland of Puerto Rico, and who, in the opening pages suffers a severe accident owing to a terrible hurricane. 'It's a fictional hurricane, that is very important,' says Cummins. 'People were mad [when they thought] I wrote about Hurricane Maria, which I did not do.' Beyond hurricanes, the book is about family, identity, class, displacement, the lives we leave behind, and the pull of home. The characters are based in part on Cummins's own family – Rafaela, in particular, mirrors Cummins's paternal grandmother, who grew up in a wealthy family in Puerto Rico, but who, aged 16, was shipped to a naval base in Trinidad to get a job, after her father lost his fortune. 'It was a very shocking circumstance for her to find herself in need of a 'j-o-b' and she never really recovered,' says Cummins. 'She spent the rest of her life being like 'Don't you know who I am?' And then it was even worse when they moved to the United States, because people treated her like she was Puerto Rican, and she was like 'I'm not that kind of Puerto Rican'.' These layers of prejudice were something Cummins found fascinating to unpack. 'It wasn't until I was like 30 that I [realised] well, there's probably a reason why she was so insistent on making sure everyone around her came from wealth, because she was constantly experiencing prejudice and racism in [the United States]. It was her way of signalling to people that she was a human being. And of course, she was also hella racist, and didn't recognise that in herself.' At the heart of the novel are the different, often conflicting, relationships these three women of different generations have with who they are, and what their culture, heritage and language mean to them. Cummins says that in writing the book, she was channelling 'a lot of the questions that were raised by the experience of the publication of American Dirt and sort of having my ethnicity adjudicated on Twitter'. 'I think when you're a person of mixed ethnicity, which is many Americans, it's a tricky thing to unpack, even when you're not being called on to the carpet by the New York Times. I always had a confusing relationship with my identity. I've always been super proud of my roots on both sides, but I didn't know how to articulate it. I'm generation X. We did not grow up with this kind of language of entitlement that younger generations have about insisting on their own identity.' My cousin Julie was a writer – she was incredibly talented … I think after she died ... I wanted to do the things that she could no longer do Born in Spain, Cummins moved around a lot as a child, owing to her father's naval career, but calls Gaithersburg, Maryland, her hometown. She had what she describes as 'a typical happy American childhood', infused with elements of Irish and Puerto Rican culture. When she was 19, her mother signed her up for the Rose of Tralee, and she competed as the Washington DC Rose. 'I ended up making lifelong friendships. One of my best friends was the girl who was the Paris Rose that year – she was the first ever black Rose. Her father is from Senegal, mom from Sligo. We were in each other's weddings. She visited me in December for my 50th birthday.' Later Cummins would return to Ireland and spend time bartending in Belfast (she had friends there from childhood, having hosted them as part of the Belfast Children's Summer Programme, which sent Troubles-era Belfast kids to stay with American families). She wrote 'terrible poetry' during this time, but it wasn't until she moved to New York to work in publishing that her writing began in earnest. 'I had this notion that I could infiltrate the publishing industry and learn about writing,' she says. 'And I found that everyone who was in publishing had that same idea ... But I would read a ton, and frequently I would be reading these books and [think], I know what this writer got paid, and I think I could do better, or at least as well.' Novels are the greatest generator of empathy we have available to us as human beings Her first book was a memoir, A Rip in Heaven , about a terrible tragedy that befell her family when she was 16: two of her cousins, Julie and Robin Kerry, were brutally raped and murdered in an assault that only Cummins's brother, Tom, survived. 'It was such a formative experience in my life that I have no way of knowing how I would be different if it hadn't happened,' she says, when asked how the incident shaped her. 'I will say, I don't think I would be a writer. My cousin Julie was a writer – she was incredibly talented ... I think after she died, I felt all the ways the world lost her. I wanted to do the things that she could no longer do.' Following A Rip in Heaven came two novels about Ireland: The Outside Boy, about a Traveller boy set in 1959, and The Crooked Branch, set during the Famine. Then came American Dirt, and with it, pandemonium. But the only thing to do was return to the quiet of the page and finally explore the Puerto Rican side of her heritage. Speak to Me of Home was written in the hours when her kids were at school, and during writing trips to Puerto Rico, where she might sit for 14 hours a day, cranking out word after word. For Cummins, novels are 'the greatest generator of empathy we have available to us as human beings', and the best space to explore difficult topics. 'What I love about a really good novel is it allows you to have a conversation without getting stuck in the vocabulary. You don't have to use words about identity to talk about identity – you talk about the characters and their experiences.' Speak to Me of Home is published by Tinder Press
BBC News
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Newshour Gazan doctor loses nine children in Israeli strike
A Palestinian doctor was at work in Nasser hospital in Khan Younis when nine of her ten children were killed and her husband wounded by an Israeli airstrike. It is the latest tragedy as Israel's military campaign continues to place a huge toll on the civilian population. The Israeli military says 'the claim regarding harm to uninvolved civilians is under review'. We hear from a Bulgarian doctor who is working at the hospital. Also in the programme: The dissident Iranian director Jafar Panahi has won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival for "It Was Just an Accident" -- a movie shot in secret and inspired by his own experience in prison; and Five years after American author Jenine Cummins was vilified for her novel American Dirt, she tells us why she wrote her new book. (Picture: Civil defence teams carry a body after the strike in Khan Younis. Credit: Getty)
NZ Herald
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- NZ Herald
Book of the day: Speak To Me Of Home by Jeanine Cummins
Seven years on from American Dirt, her page-turning novel telling the story of a Mexican mother and her son fleeing for their lives to the US after a cartel-inflicted family tragedy, Jeanine Cummins delivers a quite different tale. Fans of American Dirt, of which there are many, despite an outcry
New York Times
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
In Her Follow-Up to ‘American Dirt,' Jeanine Cummins Turns to Puerto Rico
In January 2020, Jeanine Cummins's novel 'American Dirt,' about a Mexican mother and son who flee cartel violence in Acapulco for the United States, arrived to rapturous praise from the publishing world, became an Oprah's Book Club pick and went on to sell over four million copies in 40 languages. It was a literary event that quickly became a cause célèbre. Scathing critical response accused Cummins of stereotyping, cultural appropriation and racism in her thin depiction of the border and its inhabitants. The vitriol grew so intense that her publisher canceled her 40-city book tour. Cummins's new novel, 'Speak to Me of Home,' is ostensibly about Puerto Rico. Gone are the propulsive writing, drug lords and chase scenes. In their place are quieter epiphanies: evocative, poetic passages about characters falling in love and the close bond between parents and children. But despite the publisher's framing, the book is not, in fact, about Puerto Rico. It's about the internal lives of three generations of women in one Puerto Rican-Irish family, and their shared preoccupation with their own whiteness, from the 1960s to today. Born in San Juan, Rafaela marries a white naval officer from Missouri in 1968, and 10 years later he moves their young family to St. Louis. Their 7-year-old daughter, Ruth, tries to assimilate into her new life in the Midwest, forgetting most of her Spanish and smoothing the edges of the prejudice and xenophobia around her (including among her father's family). Two decades later, Ruth's own teenage daughter, Daisy, moves from Palisades, N.Y., to San Juan, where she's longed to live since her childhood visits back to her mother's birthplace. The narrative jumps in time and geography across these three women's histories, until a devastating accident brings them together in 2023. As I read I thought of the Puerto Rican poet Fernando Fortunato Vizcarrondo's poem '¿Y Tu Agüela, Aonde Ejtá?' ('And Where Is Your Grandma?'), addressed from a Black Puerto Rican man to a light-skinned one, whom he accuses of keeping his dark-skinned grandmother hidden in the kitchen. Puerto Ricans are well aware that, regardless of what we look like now, our ancestors bear evidence of the mixed-race heritage of the majority of our people. In contrast to Vizcarrondo's poem, 'Speak to Me of Home' conflates race with ethnicity, resting a significant part of the plot on the results of a stealthy DNA test. Ruth is mystified by her American-born children's insistence on their Puerto Rican identity (her son, Charlie Hayes, changes his name to Carlos Hayes-Acuña in seventh grade, because 'it's cool to be Puerto Rican'), and even denies her own: 'Do I need to remind you that I'm white, for God's sake? Look at me!' The novel views Puerto Rican culture from a distance, disconnected from the archipelago's colonial history and lacking the nuance of lived experience. Carlos claims Bad Bunny 'gets too much airplay,' without appreciating the artist's importance in contemporary Puerto Rican life. This disconnect is perhaps strongest in the snobby Rafa, who resents the hostile gaze of her white Missouri neighbors even as she marginalizes the only other Puerto Rican family she encounters there: 'That woman would not have been fit to sweep my father's floors in San Juan.' I simply couldn't extend poetic license to the author's sloppiness with detail, about Puerto Rico and otherwise — which, however petty, was enough to take me out of the story. A crucial plot point is the hurricane that begins the novel (in San Juan in June, when hurricanes are relatively rare in the Caribbean compared with, say, September); though Cummins's characters seem unaware of the ubiquitous local distinctions between a vaguada, a tropical storm, a hurricane, a cyclone. A single slice of fried plantain is mistakenly referred to as a 'tostone,' instead of a tostón. Facebook wasn't available in 1999, when Rafa uses the platform to search for a long-lost friend. The verisimilitude of Cummins's present-day Puerto Rico is superficial at best, and references — to alfajores, Yaucono coffee, pasteles and alcapurrias — seem to be plucked from Wikipedia to add authenticity. Cummins's story does involve a proverbial grandparent hidden in the kitchen, and the revelation comes across as an attempt to defend the author's own Latinidad. But skin color does not define identity; depth of experience does. As we say in Puerto Rico, No es lo mismo decirlo que hacerlo. Saying it is not the same as doing it.
