Regardless of this bravado, she is clearly preoccupied with the idea that she is not the right person to tell this story. I was like, f*ck everybody else.This is the story that I'm compelled to write

This is the story that I’m compelled to write.” I mean really, that’s where I ended up, I was like, I don’t really care what other people think of it. And in the end, I was like, f*ck everybody else. It gave me this incredibly painful new perspective on what really mattered to me. Then this awful grief that I had, it was like a springboard. It was the first thing I had written, or even read since he had died.”Īt that point, she had been “steeping in the research for three years”, visiting migrant shelters and orphanages in Mexico, “trying to get the humanity right. Four months after my dad died, I just dragged my laptop into bed with me one day and I wrote the opening scene of American Dirt. I think a lot of writers or artists would understand the notion that when you’re in a really bad place, the thing to get you out of it is your work. “I’ve had trauma before in my life but I was completely undone. She wrote drafts of American Dirt from various perspectives for years, reluctant to write from the perspective of a Mexican migrant, wary of accusations of cultural appropriation.īut those previous drafts “sucked”, she says, and something changed for Cummins when her father died unexpectedly in 2016, the week before Trump was elected. I didn’t know if I had the right to tell the story, I still. “I resisted it for four years, because I just didn’t want to stick my neck out. However, she had no intention of writing a book about Mexico. I felt very much connected to both parts of his heritage.” I’m also a person who has lived in many places.” She recalls her father coming to her school in the US on St Patrick’s Day dressed in typical Puerto Rican clothes to sing Clancy Brothers songs at school assembly. I’m married to an Irishman who was an undocumented immigrant for many years. “I come from a family, like most people in, with mixed ethnicity. It was, Cummins says, “quite natural” that she would write about immigration. Much of their dangerous journey to the US is made on the roofs of Le Bestia, the infamous Mexican freight train on which half a million migrants travel every year, often risking their lives jumping aboard while the train is moving. It is the story of an Acapulco bookshop owner and her son on a desperate journey to escape Mexico after their family is killed by a drug cartel. It sold for a seven-figure sum after a nine-way bidding war and a movie is already in the works.Īnd yet, there are already critics saying that she had no business writing this book at all. Jeanine Cummins’ new novel American Dirt is on every “must read” list for 2020, has been described as “The Grapes of Wrath for our times”, and praised by John Grisham, Stephen King and Sandra Cisneros.

Janine cummings