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?”
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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.
“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
