Happy (is it happy?) new year! I’m kicking off 2024 with an essay about a somewhat controversial aspect of writing that I find pretty interesting, and, because I mess around with fiction, personally relevant. That aspect is writing the other.
Over the holidays, I read Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt, which was published in 2020 and quickly became famous for all the wrong reasons. In short: Cummins is a non-Mexican author who wrote about a Mexican mother and son fleeing to the U.S. border after a cartel murders their entire family. She apparently received a seven-figure advance for the book, a bunch of famous writers like Stephen King provided glowing blurbs, and Oprah picked it for her book club. Then a number of negative reviews came out, the publisher canceled Cummins’s book tour, and a fierce debate erupted in the literary community over who has the right to tell a given story.
I am not here, four years later, to jump into that debate. Truthfully, I don’t think I ever would have read American Dirt if it didn’t spark such a controversy. I finally decided to when I did because, to be totally honest, I needed a literal beach read and figured with this one I could learn what problematic representation of characters outside one’s lived experience looks like—so as to avoid it in my own writing. Ultimately I found it to be a propulsive commercial thriller, which isn’t much of a problem. However, I totally understand, if I don’t viscerally feel it because I’m also not Mexican, the argument that American Dirt’s treatment of its characters is basically trauma porn. While some critics took issue with Cummins’s initial decision to write a story that wasn’t hers, the wider problem, especially to people of color, seemed to be that she hadn’t done a good job of it. Whatever research she’d done, it hadn’t been enough to avoid fetishizing the suffering of migrants and to render them as complex, genuine people.
Maybe if American Dirt hadn’t been hailed as “a Grapes of Wrath for our times” and loudly marketed as a grand literary achievement instead of the flawed commercial story that it was, it might not have inspired such backlash. But it was, and it did, and despite selling over 3 million copies it now exists as a cautionary tale around writing the other.
Speaking of the phrase “writing the other,” a book I did read in 2020 was titled exactly that, and as a straight male working on the second draft of a novel that includes non-straight, non-male characters, it helped me start to ease the anxiety I felt about doing justice to the lived experience of people whose internal and external worlds were much different than my own. What I found by reading it, then re-reading my own work in turn, was that I had been so careful to avoid “getting it wrong” that those characters reached no more than a small stretch of the depth afforded to my main character, who is—surprise—based on a younger version of myself. This was confirmed to me in early reads by people in my circle, and even after multiple revisions over another year and a half, I was gently informed by a gay peer in a writing workshop that I still had a ways to go. It was only after our instructor, who also identifies as gay, offered his take that something finally clicked for me. These are the notes I took as he spoke (with small edits and context for this essay in parentheses):
It’s (writing the other) a good thing for all of us to think about, esp if we’re not totally tapped into something. How do you do research of course matters. Beyond all that though, it comes down to humanity, and emotion, and need, and desire. This differs from (identity) to (identity), but always remember, bring it back to the heart and the truth of the character, this is our best guide, this gives us the best chance of creating a specific character.
What followed was a discussion that distilled these ideas into a clear point: when you write people as little more than one given aspect of their identity, even with a bunch of “research” you’re pretty much destined to end up with a caricature. When you write from a place of motivation, desires, hopes, feelings…you stand a much better chance of creating a character with actual depth. So yes, it’s important to educate yourself, but far more important is to treat each character as a real person. To write humans as human. What a concept!
Now, does this “revelation” mean each of the characters in my first novel will be indisputably authentic when I’m finally done tinkering with them? Probably not. Rest assured though, that if I ever land a book deal, it’s extremely unlikely to net me a million dollars upfront like Cummins’s did for American Dirt. And you better believe I’ll get a bunch of sensitivity reads between then and publication day if I do. Nobody needs any more problems from another white dude, do they?