American Dirt author Jeanine Cummins: ‘I didn’t need to justify my right to write that book’

Five years after being vilified for exploiting the migrant experience in her bestseller, the author reveals how the backlash inspired her latest novelWhen 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.” Continue reading...

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