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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
New York Times
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The ‘American Dirt' Backlash Nearly Stopped Jeanine Cummins From Writing
By most measures, Jeanine Cummins's 2020 novel 'American Dirt' was a colossal success. A propulsive story about a Mexican mother and son who flee to the United States to escape a drug cartel, the novel sold for seven figures. It was an Oprah book club pick, won endorsements from best-selling authors like Stephen King and John Grisham, and became a runaway hit, selling more than four million copies in nearly 40 languages. In other ways, though, 'American Dirt' was a disaster. Cummins, who grew up in Maryland and is of Irish and Puerto Rican descent, was widely condemned for what some claimed was an insensitive and clichéd depiction of Mexican migrants. To critics of the book, she became the embodiment of the publishing industry's racial blind spots, and the main character in a caustic debate about whether, and how, authors should write outside of their own cultural experience. Cummins thought her career was over. She wasn't sure if she'd be able to write again, or if she even wanted to. But a few years ago, the idea for a new novel started to take shape — a story that grew out of the experience of having her cultural identity debated. 'In the aftermath of publishing 'American Dirt,' I was doing a lot of soul searching and self-reflection on how did I get here, how did this happen?' Cummins said during an interview at the public library near her home in Rockland County, N.Y. 'So I started thinking a lot about my own identity, which I'd been thinking about my entire life privately, but had never had to grapple with publicly before.' Those questions led Cummins to trace her roots in Puerto Rico, which fed into her new novel, 'Speak to Me of Home.' The narrative follows a family's turbulent history across several generations. Rafaela Acuña y Daubón, who is based on Cummins's grandmother, moves from San Juan to Trinidad to work on a U.S. naval base as a secretary — a job she's forced to take after her father's business collapses and the family's wealth evaporates. She meets a handsome Irish American man and marries him, despite his father's bigoted objections to her background. They move to St. Louis, where Rafaela feels isolated and presses their children to assimilate, hoping to protect them from the discrimination she faces. Rafaela's daughter, Ruth, feels cut off from her Puerto Rican roots, until her own daughter, Daisy, moves to San Juan and discovers a momentous family secret. Much of the narrative was mined from Cummins's own family, she said. When her paternal grandmother Maria was still a teenager, her family lost its fortune and sent her to work on a naval base in Trinidad, where she met Cummins's Irish American grandfather and eventually married him and moved to St. Louis. While interviewing relatives to research the novel, Cummins learned that her grandfather's family had objected to him marrying a Puerto Rican woman, and that Maria, who thought of herself as upper class, was shocked to encounter pervasive racism in Missouri. In incidents that Cummins repurposed in the novel, Maria was forbidden from using the ladies' locker room at a country club, and urged her children not to identify as Puerto Rican. Cummins's father, who died in 2016, grew up traveling between St. Louis and Puerto Rico, but he rarely brought up his Puerto Rican heritage, she said. Growing up, she knew more about her roots in Ireland, where she lived for two years after college, bartending and writing poetry. Her first two novels, 'The Outside Boy' and 'The Crooked Branch,' were works of historical fiction set in Ireland. With 'American Dirt,' which drew early comparisons to 'The Grapes of Wrath,' Cummins seemed poised to break out. But pretty quickly, the hype was drowned out by those who argued the novel was full of harmful stereotypes about Mexico, depicting it as a violent, corrupt country overrun by drug cartels. Others seized on Cummins's author's note, in which she said she hoped to counter misconceptions about migrants as a 'helpless, impoverished, faceless brown mass,' and that she wished that someone 'slightly browner than me' had written the novel. When Winfrey announced 'American Dirt' as her book club selection, the backlash was swift. A group of 141 authors signed an open letter asking Winfrey to drop the novel, which they said was 'exploitative, oversimplified, and ill-informed, too often erring on the side of trauma fetishization.' Winfrey decided to highlight the debate. Instead of the usual format, Cummins was brought on to discuss the book alongside three Latina writers — Julissa Arce, Esther Cepeda and Reyna Grande — who were critical of the novel. 'I wasn't able to respond in that moment — there was nothing I could say,' Cummins said. 'I wasn't able to defend myself.' She recalls feeling like a magnet for people's pent-up frustrations. 'I was sort of the lit match to dry kindling,' she said. 'It was incredibly disconcerting that I was the person who became the example of the white supremacy problem in publishing, as a part Puerto Rican woman from a working-class background.' She was particularly stung when people who had initially supported the book withdrew their endorsements, 'in ways that did not feel genuine, that were entire self-serving and dare I say cowardly,' she said. In hindsight, Cummins acknowledges some positive outcomes from the controversy, which brought attention to how the book business often fails to promote works by writers of color, while heaping money and acclaim on white authors. 'The conversation that did happen around 'American Dirt' was long overdue, though I would have preferred not have been in the cross hairs of it,' Cummins said. Cummins said she does not regret writing 'American Dirt,' though she wishes the debate about the novel had centered on the humanitarian crisis at the border. Still, she was unable to write for a year after the controversy. Once she began, she was terrified of the scrutiny she might face and had a couple of false starts, she said. 'She was trying to find her sea legs,' said the novelist and bookseller Ann Patchett, who was among the prominent fans of 'American Dirt' and was steadfast in her praise of the book as the backlash built. When she read 'Speak to Me of Home,' Patchett said she was struck by how Cummins navigated questions about cultural identity and belonging, some of the same issues that became a flashpoint with 'American Dirt.' 'She found a way to make art out of her experience, but she made it into something loving instead of something full of rage,' she said. 'Speak to Me of Home' has drawn mixed pre-publication reviews. Publishers Weekly called it 'engrossing'; Kirkus Reviews said Cummins was 'more nuanced' in her treatment of issues like colorism and class, but argued that she 'still indulges in tired tropes.' Holt released the novel on May 13. Pamela Klinger-Horn, the events coordinator at Valley Bookseller in Stillwater, Minn., said she saw no signs that readers were put off by the 'American Dirt' controversy. 'What I've heard from readers is that they liked 'American Dirt' and they're excited to read something new by her,' she said. At Bethany Beach Books in Delaware, pre-orders for Cummins's new novel have been strong, and the store has sold more than 70 tickets for an upcoming event for the book, said Zandria Senft, the store's manager. 'A lot of people want to support her and hear her speak about her new book,' Senft said. 'It's so refreshing that she didn't back down and that she put herself back out into the world.' The reaction Cummins cared about the most was from her own extended family and her relatives in Puerto Rico, she said. 'Because this was dicey and a lot of it comes from our family history and it covers a lot of themes that we don't talk about in my family, I wasn't sure how they were going to feel about it,' she said. Cummins sent copies to her father's siblings and cousins and their children, and recently the family gathered over Zoom to discuss the book. To her relief, their reactions were positive, and the conversation later turned to her cousin Carolina Quixano's recent appearance on 'The Bachelor.' Cummins is now restarting her public life as an author, after a five-year hiatus, and is preparing for an eight-city book tour. While she doesn't relish rehashing the debate over 'American Dirt,' she finally feels able to talk about it. 'It's not my favorite subject,' she said. 'But I'm not afraid of it.'
Washington Post
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Ocean Vuong's new novel, 'The Emperor of Gladness,' is Winfrey's latest book club pick
NEW YORK — Oprah Winfrey's latest book club pick is a new novel from Ocean Vuong , one of the country's most admired young writers. Winfrey announced Tuesday that she has chosen Vuong's 'The Emperor of Gladness,' in which the Vietnamese American author tells of the bond between a suicidal teen and an elderly widow with dementia. Winfrey's video podcast interview with Vuong can be seen on her YouTube channel, among other outlets. The interview was held in Chicago at a Starbucks, which is partnering with Winfrey for the current edition of her book club. 'Ocean draws from his own personal experiences of being born in Vietnam, raised in a working-class family in Connecticut, and working as a fast-food server as inspiration for this story, which features an unlikely cast of truly unforgettable characters,' Winfrey said in a statement. 'This award-winning author and acclaimed poet has written in stunning prose, a heartfelt and powerful examination of those living on the fringes of society, and the unique challenges they face to survive and thrive.' Vuong, 36, has received numerous honors, including the T.S. Eliot Prize and Pushcart Prize for his poetry, a MacArthur Fellowship and a Whiting grant awarded to promising writers. His other books include the novel 'On Earth We Were Briefly Gorgeous' and the poetry collections 'Night Sky with Exit Wounds' and 'Time Is a Mother.' In a statement Tuesday, he said that receiving 'the call' from Winfrey was one of the highlights of his life, with a poignant echo of his childhood. 'Sitting in my mother's nail salon, I watched women see Oprah featuring an author on her show, which played each day in the salon, and literally rise from their seats with poise and confidence, saying they're gonna walk to the Barnes and Noble across the street and buy a book, suddenly armed with access to the discourse, and thereby in possession of the cultural center,' he said. 'To think of my book being invited to join such a profound lineage is truly awe-inspiring. I only wish my mother were alive to see it. Among all the literary achievements in an author's life, this would be the one she truly recognizes.'
The Independent
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Ocean Vuong's new novel, 'The Emperor of Gladness,' is Winfrey's latest book club pick
Oprah Winfrey's latest book club pick is a new novel from Ocean Vuong, one of the country's most admired young writers. Winfrey announced Tuesday that she has chosen Vuong's 'The Emperor of Gladness,' in which the Vietnamese American author tells of the bond between a suicidal teen and an elderly widow with dementia. Winfrey's video podcast interview with Vuong can be seen on her YouTube channel, among other outlets. 'Ocean draws from his own personal experiences of being born in Vietnam, raised in a working-class family in Connecticut, and working as a fast-food server as inspiration for this story, which features an unlikely cast of truly unforgettable characters,' Winfrey said in a statement. 'This award-winning author and acclaimed poet has written in stunning prose, a heartfelt and powerful examination of those living on the fringes of society, and the unique challenges they face to survive and thrive.' Vuong, 36, has received numerous honors, including the T.S. Eliot Prize and Pushcart Prize for his poetry, a MacArthur Fellowship and a Whiting grant awarded to promising writers. His other books include the novel 'On Earth We Were Briefly Gorgeous' and the poetry collections 'Night Sky with Exit Wounds' and 'Time Is a Mother.' In a statement Tuesday, he said that receiving 'the call' from Winfrey was one of the highlights of his life, with a poignant echo of his childhood. 'Sitting in my mother's nail salon, I watched women see Oprah featuring an author on her show, which played each day in the salon, and literally rise from their seats with poise and confidence, saying they're gonna walk to the Barnes and Noble across the street and buy a book, suddenly armed with access to the discourse, and thereby in possession of the cultural center,' he said. 'To think of my book being invited to join such a profound lineage is truly awe-inspiring. I only wish my mother were alive to see it. Among all the literary achievements in an author's life, this would be the one she truly recognizes.'
