Jeanine Cummins on her latest novel: “One of the great joys of writing this book was to imagine a different outcome for her, and for my dad, really”

Jeanine Cummins’ latest novel, Speak To Me Of Home, focuses on women from different generations of the same Puerto Rican family. There’s Rafaela, who marries Peter Brennan Jr in San Juan in 1968, before uprooting her young family to St. Louis in the US, sparking a series of disappointments.

Growing up in the early ’80s, Rafaela’s daughter, Ruth Brennan, lets go of the customs and traditions of Puerto Rico, only to be forced to reflect on her past, when in 2023 – after a hurricane ravages the island – she and Rafaela travel to be at the bedside of Ruth’s critically injured daughter, Daisy.

Drawing on Cummins’ own Puerto Rican and Irish heritage, the story has the feel of a classic family drama. Was it a genre she always wanted to explore?

“Not really,” replies the 50-year-old author from her home in New York. “I mean, I’ve always thought about both my sets of grandparents as potential subject matter for a novel, because all four of them had incredibly fascinating lives. When my dad was alive, I don’t think I could have done it – it was too personal. A lot of what happened after my last publication led me to the self-reflection that engendered a novel like this.”

What was your grandparents’ story?

“My grandmother Maria, the circumstances of her life are almost identical to the circumstances of the character Rafaela in the book,” explains Cummins. “She was born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico into a very wealthy family, where she grew up with servants and had a very cushy life. Then, when she was a teenager, her dad lost everything, and she was shipped off to Trinidad to get a job on a naval base.

“That was where she met my Irish grandfather. The two of them married and she moved back to St. Louis, where she spent the rest of her life being affronted because people treated her like a Puerto Rican. She was like, ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ She had an unhappy adulthood, and she had eight kids – my dad was the oldest.”

Cummins reflects further on her grandmother’s life.
“She never got over the way people treated her and was not a good mother,” she continues. “I grew up on Maria and all the stories of what a terrible mother she was, but I had never thought to ask, ‘Why? What happened to her – why was she so angry and bitter?’ Also, it was the ’50s and there was no support for women who had mental health issues, or trouble with being a mother.

“As I grew up, I started asking those questions and I always thought, maybe if she’d had a little more empathy or support, or any number of things had been different in her life, it could have been a different outcome. One of the great joys of writing this book was to imagine a different outcome for her, and for my dad, really.”

UNEXPECTED QUARTERS

Of course, what happens to older family members can have consequences years – sometimes decades – after the fact. Cummins credits her father’s faith with being a huge help to him, and says it also left her with a religious streak.

“That’s a hard one to talk about, especially in this culture,” she says. “It’s something I tend to keep quite private. But I’ve also had a lot of trauma in my life. My first book was a true crime memoir, called A Rip In Heaven. It was a family trauma that happened when I was 16 and there was a violent double homicide in my family. My brother was the only surviving victim.

“I was 16 when that happened and the only way we got through it was faith. Because when you have a trauma of that magnitude, there’s something that sometimes happens where you almost tap out of life.

You’re like, ‘I can’t handle it’, and you black out nearly. In those times, I felt supported by something other than myself.”

Growing up outside Washington DC, Cummins was a big music fan, particularly of hip hop, Paul Simon and also U2.

“I saw U2 many times,” says Cummins. “In the ’90s, I lived in Belfast for a while, and when the Popmart tour came through, I worked at the bar. I pulled pints – that was a crazy experience. I was standing in a field, at a table with a keg, and the whole night I would just switch the pints under the keg. I think I emptied eight kegs in the two hours they were onstage! The next morning, I took the train to Dublin and saw them play there.

“The next day after that, I was on my way back to Belfast and we got the news that Princess Diana had been killed. Those events are inextricably linked in my mind.”
Having previously published a number of books, in 2020, Cummins rocketed to international attention when her novel American Dirt became a New York Times bestseller, and was also selected for Oprah’s Book Club. It told the story of a Mexican bookseller forced to flee with her son to the US as an undocumented immigrant, after her reporter husband exposes a drugs kingpin.
After its initial flush of success, American Dirt became one of the biggest literary controversies of recent years, with a number of Mexican-American writers accusing the book of cultural exploitation.
There was widespread criticism followed by petitions, with Oprah Winfrey ultimately airing a two-part special on both the book and the surrounding controversy. Had Cummins been bracing herself prior to publication?

“When I handed in the book, I was nervous,” she acknowledges. “There were six or eight months of glitter. It was pure, absolute praise from the most unexpected quarters, including a whole host of incredible, top tier Latino writers. One person said, ‘It’s the great novel of Las Americas’. So I felt inoculated then. I was like, ‘I guess we’re good.’
“But then, I guess what happened is the book had a target on its back. Because there was so much praise and hype, then people started paying the wrong kind of attention. Like, ‘What’s so great about it?’ There were certain elements of the controversy that I kind of get, because I would probably be mad too if, like, a novel by an American was marketed as the great Irish novel.”

Jeanine Cummins

GENERATIONAL FAULTLINES

She reflects further on the fallout.

“It wasn’t through any fault of my own, but people propped the book up as if it was the great Mexican novel, which it was never intended to be,” says Cummins. “That happened in an environment where, Latino writers to some degree, but certainly Mexican writers specifically, had been overlooked, underpaid and undervalued for a long time. Then I came along and it was like dropping a lit match into dry kindling.

“But the thing where it jumped the rails was when it became about my ethnicity. That was so unfair and it should have been out of bounds. They were ad hominem attacks – they were not about the book, they were about me. I would also argue that it doesn’t happen to certain kinds of writers. It tends to happen very specifically to people like me – women like me.”

The book also exposed generational faultlines. A Gen Xer, Cummins had come of age in an era when anything was permissible in art, whereas American Dirt arrived in a far more contentious climate. What was the reaction like in the publishing world?

“There were many different opinions. Inside the publisher, there were many people who were calling for my head,” says Cummins, “However, my editor and publisher was rock solid – she threw herself on every grenade for me. My agent was amazing and did the same, and the bosses of all those people were solid. They had my back totally.

“You just talked about a generational divide, and they had to contend with the entry level, that age range, who were outraged. They don’t want a walkout, so it was a tough position for them to be in as well, and they walked it as best they could. A couple of people’s careers didn’t survive it – and it remains to be seen whether mine will survive it.

“It’s two weeks until publication, and we’re about to find out if I’m allowed to have a future as a writer. I don’t know. We’ll see.

• Speak To Me Of Home is out now.