‘American Dirt’: Who gets to tell your story?
It was supposed to be the book launch of every author’s dream: Jeanine Cummins had scored a rare publishing industry trifecta. She sold “American Dirt” for seven figures. A Hollywood studio bought the film rights. Oprah Winfrey anointed it her Book Club pick.
Yesterday, Ms. Cummins’ publisher canceled her tour and issued a public apology amid a firestorm of accusations of cultural appropriation and stereotyping.
It’s a pattern familiar to writers of young adult, science fiction, and other genre fiction. But “American Dirt,” industry observers say, is the most high-profile work of literary fiction bound up in a thorny question: Who gets to tell someone’s story?
Ms. Cummins herself acknowledged the debate in her afterword of her thriller about a Mexican mother and son escaping a drug lord by fleeing to the U.S. border. “As a non-immigrant and non-Mexican, I had no business writing a book set almost entirely in Mexico, set entirely among immigrants,” she wrote. “I wished someone slightly browner than me would write it.”
The furor over “American Dirt” centers around a previously noncontroversial
The limits of sensitivity readersA firestorm or a hiccup?
