Bouncing back from bestseller's backlash

After being accused of exploiting the migrant experience in American Dirt, Jeanine Cummins explains how the furore inspired her new novel

- By Lucy Knight

When 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 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.”

Eventually that answer shifted to maybe, and now, five years on, the 50-year-old author is firmly at yes. “I’m really glad I wrote that book,” she says. “I’m proud of it. But having to endure the experience of publication, it was brutal.”

American Dirt had been expected to be one of the buzziest books of 2020, having reportedly earned Cummins a seven-figure advance. Copies of the novel, about a mother and son fleeing a drug cartel in Mexico, arrived in bookshops emblazoned with a quote from the thriller writer Don Winslow, who called it “a Grapes of Wrath for our times”, and it was chosen as an Oprah’s book club pick.