Advertisement

Jeanine Cummins on American Dirt: ‘I wrote the story that was in my heart’

Standing up: Jeanine Cummins readily acknowledges that Latino voices are under-represented in mainstream fiction
Standing up: Jeanine Cummins readily acknowledges that Latino voices are under-represented in mainstream fiction

When Jeanine Cummins submitted her novel American Dirt, about a middle-class Mexican woman and her eight-year-old son forced to flee Mexico and enter the US as illegal immigrants after their family are wiped out by a drugs cartel, she had no idea that within weeks of publication, the book would be making headline news.

Until then, she had been “a lower mid-list author”, with two novels and a memoir “modestly published, and happy with that”. What happened next was, by any account, astonishing. Just days after submitting the manuscript, 16 publishers were fighting to buy American Dirt. It went to a nine-way auction, with the victors, Flatiron, stumping up more than $1 million for the US rights. Film rights were optioned and rapturous praise began to pour in from luminaries such as Stephen King, Ann Patchett and John Grisham. Don Winslow called it “a Grapes of Wrath for our times”.

And then came the ultimate accolade. On the day of its worldwide release in January, Oprah announced it as one of her book club picks, and it went straight onto the bestseller lists.

The combination of its propulsive narrative (it really is thrilling from the very first sentence) and being a tender love story about a mother and her young son, together with its sensitive subject matter, clearly hit the right note at the right time.

“The ways in which we’re engaged in the story of migration in this country tend to be very superficial,” she says. “We have these political narratives from the Right and the Left, and everyone paints migrants with their own preconceived notions; either they need our help and we need to save them, or they’re rapists and murderers. The truth of their humanity is this gap in the middle that I felt like many people haven’t really thought about, so I think that’s what they were responding to.”

But while early reviews were mostly positive, an extraordinarily vitriolic piece, published on an obscure academic blog called Tropics of Meta a month before the book came out, proved to be a game-changer. The article, Pendeja, You Ain’t Steinbeck: My Bronca with Fake-Ass Social Justice Literature” by Myriam Gurba, a self-identifying queer Mexican-American writer, called American Dirt “an obra de caca” (a work of shit). Boasting of “zealously hate-reading the book”, Gurba accused Cummins of cultural appropriation (Cummins is not Mexican), of filling her novel with stereotypes, and of exploiting “the gringo appetite for Mexican pain”. When Gurba’s article was picked up by The New York Times, it went viral.

That was just the start. American Dirt was quickly labelled “trauma porn”. A petition calling for Oprah to rescind her book choice was signed by dozens of Latin American writers, and some reviewers started clambering over the fence. One shamefully even declared herself unfit to review it, because she herself was neither Mexican nor a migrant. Media stories about “the Latino backlash” appeared, the Twitterati came out in droves, and such violent threats were made to Cummins that the publishers cancelled a nationwide book tour. Cummins herself, unsurprisingly, went to ground.

“People can read it and hate it and write terrible reviews, that’s fine. No one needs to love it, but it has been distressing to see people say they will never read it and it’s a racist piece of garbage. How do you determine whether it’s a racist piece of garbage if you refuse to read it?”Cummins acknowledges “a legitimate backlog of frustration” in the Latino community, and yes, she feels their voices have been, and are still, under-represented, and yes, 80 per cent of commissioning editors are white.

If her book, which took her five years to research, were to spark “that long-simmering, long-ignored, really important conversation”, she would be pleased, but unfortunately “the conversation immediately devolves into hatred and ugliness. We need freedom and dialogue to make progress, but right now it feels like a strangulation of the dialogue.”

Today, she says her biggest regret was writing the “clumsy” author’s note at the end of the novel (removed in the second printing) justifying her reasons for writing it. “The first question in those early editorial meetings was always, ‘Why did you write this book?’ I’d give my answer, but it wasn’t enough. They all wanted to understand what my personal connection to the story was, so I felt I had to list some reasons, but that just served to open the door for people to make their criticisms extremely personal instead of about the book.”

Having a Puerto Rican grandmother, as well as a husband who was an undocumented (Irish) immigrant seemed like strong connections. But Cummins now sees her overall apologetic tone was ill-judged, in particular this cringe-making line: “I wished someone slightly browner than me would write it,” which an increasingly hostile press jumped on. “It was all a mistake, because the real reason I was drawn to write the book was because it was a story that was in my heart and that should have been the beginning and end of that answer, because as a fiction writer I should have absolute liberty to write whatever story I want to write.”

Cummins is one of many novelists who rightly fears the rise of the cultural appropriation hit squad. Being 45, and incidentally from a working-class family (her father was in the US Navy, her mother was a nurse and her brother is a firefighter) she has observed the growing gap between her generation and millennials over questions of identity. “We don’t speak the same language, especially when it comes to fiction. I worry that people will begin to feel the need to censor their own stories, and that editors and publishers will feel the need to censor writers because they’re afraid of a backlash. The writer should be free to write that story as they feel it and then the market is what determines the success of that novel, that story.”

And how is the market determining the success of American Dirt? “In the early weeks after publication, when I was in pain and feeling very distraught over what was happening, my agent called to give me the sales figures. American Dirt was number one on The New York Times bestseller list, which means that people were reading the book.” Since then almost half a million copies have sold. Jeanine Cummins should take heart, and she should keep writing.

American Dirt (Tinder Press, £14.99) is out now, buy it here.

Read more

The best books to look forward to in 2020