Totally Booked: LIVE! In this special episode of the podcast (in-person at the Whitby Hotel with a live audience!), #1 New York Times bestselling author Jeanine Cummins joins Zibby on stage to discuss SPEAK TO ME OF HOME, a striking multigenerational story inspired by her own family’s complex Puerto Rican heritage. The conversation explores identity, belonging, intergenerational trauma, and the aftermath of the controversy surrounding AMERICAN DIRT. Jeanine opens up about the emotional journey that led to this novel, her grandmother's legacy, the pain of losing a language, and the nuances of being both white and Latina. Together, she and Zibby discuss the power of fiction to spark empathy and difficult conversations, the dangers of censorship, and how stories connect us all.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome. 

Jeanine: Thank you. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh. Okay. This book was so good. You were such a great writer. I know you know that I'm such a huge fan of yours, but oh my gosh.

Tell everybody what speak to me of home is about. 

Jeanine: The hardest question, right? A hundred thousand words distilled to a couple sentences. Yes. Elevator pitch. Yes. Go. Yes, I'm not good at this part, but it's three generations of a family, very similar to my own a grandmother born and raised in Puerto Rico.

Her. Child the middle generation Mother Ruth, is back and forth, spends her childhood back and forth between Puerto Rico and St. Louis, which was my father's experience growing up. And then the third generation Daisy and her siblings who have a hope of returning to their roots and all the ways that these three generations love and misunderstand each other.

Zibby: Amazing. Where did this come from and how did you decide this would be the next book? 

Jeanine: I think in the wake of the publication of American Dirt, which you may have heard was a little bit rocky. It took me a minute to figure out what I wanted to write again, whether I wanted to write again and.

In that time, I think I started doing a little bit of sort of self-exploration. There was much made of my ethnicity at that time, and I started asking myself questions about how I got here, how did I get here, how did I get to this moment where my identity is under a microscope? Am I doing something wrong?

And that question led me into the exploration of my family history. So.. 

Zibby: Do you want for, because not everybody may know what happened with American Dirt that led you to explore your identity. Do you wanna just,.. 

Jeanine: What's the nutshell version? There were so many things that created the controversy, but the publication of that novel was extremely controversial in ways that I did not anticipate.

And much of the controversy was predicated on the fact that I wrote a novel wherein most of the characters were Mexican and Central American, and I am not. But I am Latina and asserting that I was Latina was problematic for some people, not least of all, because I also identify as white, and I didn't understand that in 2020.

I would still have to explain to people that Latinos come in different colors. These two things are not mutually exclusive. I can be both. But my identity has always been not simple. And so I started asking myself, what is it about that. What? What is fascinating about it to people?

What is interesting about it? To me, which of the three generations has the most sort of legitimate claim to the way they feel about their heritage or their identity? Spoiler alert, all of them do. There is no wrong way to be who you are, and so that was that was the sort of exploration I think that was going on in the background.

Zibby: That whole thing, so to speak, has changed how people write and it has given sadly such a level of fear of exploring what it feels like to be in someone else's shoes and that act of empathy writing from someone else's perspective. Maybe you're not their same race, maybe you're not their same gender.

Maybe you're from a different city or a different town. Like I think that exercise is super valuable to do, to put yourself in someone else's shoes. So anyway, unfortunately it has caused. A movement where we can only write from our own shoes and our own experience, which I find quite limiting but.. 

Jeanine: It is limiting, but it's also temporary because fiction cannot exist within the confines of that locked box.

So it's not sustainable. And I do think that this is just a moment in time and probably a reckoning that needed to happen because. Certain voices were always elevated over other voices, and there was a legitimate backlog of frustration among writers of color who felt overlooked and undervalued and underpaid and was a very complicated moment that I found myself in the crosshairs of that really was not actually about me.

Zibby: As at the time, I. Was such a huge am a huge fan of American Dirt, and I wrote a whole thing in your defense because I was like, but this book is so amazing. Not that I didn't understand the broader implications, but I felt that was one of the books, best books I've ever read, and you are such a talented author, and that is why I was so excited when you had a new book out and so excited to delve into the pages and meet the characters and feel the heart Ruth's heartbreak when something happens to her daughter Daisy, and even the pain of throwing a party in the park and not understanding in this culture that people drop their kids off at parties versus stay and enjoy, like all these little moments, big, small.

Are so powerful. So when you decided to write this book and have this book be next, which did you know there would be like, how did you structure it? What was the thing? Were you like, there's going to be an accident or there's going to be this, or how can I tell the story? Like how did you even approach it?

'cause there's so much in this book. 

Jeanine: Yeah. I think my first entry into the book was my grandmother Maria. So the character of Raphaella in the book is based very much on my grandmother Maria. So she. They're completely different characters. Rafael is a much nicer lady than my grandmother was. She's more adventurous.

Maria was a difficult woman, but she also had a very difficult life. And it wasn't until I had children of my own that I started questioning like, why was she the way she was? The circumstances of Rafaela's life. Are exactly the same circumstances that my grandmother experienced in her young adulthood in her childhood.

She grew up the beloved, oldest daughter of a very elite family in Puerto Rico. They were very well to do. They had live-in servants. They were, the cream of the crop, so to speak. And when she was 16, she, her dad lost everything and she was shipped out to Trinidad to get a job on a naval base.

And she spent the entire rest of her life angry about it, and then she met my Irish grandfather on the naval base there, and they got married. They had eight children. My dad was the oldest, and they were back and forth to St. Between St. Louis and Puerto Rico for the first. I don't know, maybe 10 years of my dad's life.

He went to elementary school there. I think he made it, he was born in Missouri, but he made his first trip to Puerto Rico when he was three months old. And Maria spent the rest of her life affronted by the way people treated her. And not least of all, because she was like, don't you know who I am?

Don't know who I am. And of course in St. Louis, they treated her like a Puerto Rican, and she was like, but I'm not one of those Puerto Ricans. So my dad and his siblings ingested a lot of self-loathing growing up, a lot of shame. So I wanted to unpack all of that. They never talked about it. My dad never talked about what his childhood was like.

I knew it was bad but he never discussed it. And I found myself, and my siblings and I have always been so proud to be Puerto Rican, so proud. And then I understand also that like we don't really know what it means to be Puerto Rican. We did not grow up in a Puerto Rican community. We were very, my grandmother lived in a white community.

There were no mixed communities in St. Louis at the, in the fifties when they were living there. So it was just like a very difficult thing for her. And all she wanted was for her children to pass and then she succeeded largely her children grew up to be white people. They all married white people, they had us, and to varying degrees, we are all like so proud and wanting to return to the roots and we're like, we're Puerto Rican.

And sometimes our parents are like. Are you though? So I wanted to explore all of that and I wanted to give my grandmother a do-over. I wondered how would her life have been different, better, happier, if she'd had more support? If she had experienced less racism, if she had felt welcomed in St. Louis, how would my dad and his siblings have been different if they were not made to feel ashamed? Of their ethnicity when they were growing up. I mean it really was like a fundamental cornerstone of like how our family was built, was this experience and one that we'd never really talk about. So I wanted to get into it and I wanted to understand too, like how my feelings.

How my feelings were so different from my father's and his were so different from his mother's and the interplay between those things and how we ended up here. Many of the anecdotes in the story are true, many of them. 

Zibby: Like the country club scene. Is that true? 

Jeanine: Yeah. So my grandmother, my, my grandfather joined a country club in St. Louis hoping to help my grandmother make friends. And she, they would not give her a locker in the ladies' locker room because it was a white's only club. So they, the compromise was that they gave her a locker in the staff room and this was a thing I didn't know about until, I was an adult. And of course I grew up Generation X on the east coast.

So my immediate reaction is like, why did they stand for it? They went to that country club for years and my poor grandmother would go downstairs to the staff room and get into her bathing suit. And no wonder she was mad. No wonder she was a bad mother like I would've been too. She was what she suffered at that time.

It was not a thing that anyone talked about or acknowledged. She just went, she just got through it, the thing that I love about fiction, maybe more than anything else, is that it has this magical way of providing a framework to difficult conversations, right? Because you're unlikely to sit down over a glass of wine with your girlfriends and just tackle racism, like just out of the blue, right?

But if you've all read the same novel. And racism is at its core. Suddenly you can start to have these conversations about the people in the novel who you've come to care about without really having to make a political claim without really having to show your hand. But you can start to get at the humanity of these issues and maybe find common ground.

This is what I love about a good novel, 

Zibby: It's so true. That's what talking about books is all about. Yeah. It's a way to talk about life in general. 

Jeanine: Yes. Yes. 

Zibby: Like we're not actually talking about books right now. This is all a facade. 

Jeanine: That's right. 

Zibby: It's all about, it's how to find ways to live and make sense of the world and we look to fiction and memoir and everything to help as our guideposts in a way.

Jeanine: Absolutely. And that is one of the reasons why I am worried about the current trend towards censorship from both sides. But really, from the far right this, the absolute spike in book bans is terrifying. And what I keep saying to books are never the problem. Never, ever. Even the books that we find, like mind camp is not the problem, the problem is ignorance. Books are the Cure. So even the books that we find problematic or scary or bad, for whatever reason, we should be reading them and then we should be talking about them. The conversations that can open from reading any book, whether it's problematic or of offensive or not.

Those conversations are where progress can happen. Like the books are the answer. So I just, I worry about this trend in authoritarianism, trend in censorship, which is not only coming from the far as you talked about at the beginning of this conversation. Many people in our industry now are afraid to say what they think.

If it diverges at all from the party line, they're not saying it because it's too risky, and that is really frightening. We are supposed to be the bastions of free speech, right? It's not happening right now. 

Zibby: The way you articulated that is so great. It's without books. What do we have left? Without people's stories, without the diversity of thought, without all of the different perspectives, how can we all coexist?

So I totally agree with that. 

Jeanine: Yes, I knew you would.

Zibby: What author is gonna be like, no, I'm actually all for book bands. I think, let's just strike them from the list everywhere for you. 

Jeanine: Yeah. 

Zibby: Back to the book for a second. Is this one of the things that happened to you? Not to say did this happen? Did that happen, but in the home?

English Spanish was not allowed a after. 

Jeanine: Yeah. 

Zibby: Benita was having trouble in school and they said, okay, forget it, it's your fault. And no more Spanish. And there was a sense of loss in that as well. Yeah, because like in that decision came this sort of loss of culture, loss of identity, loss of so much.

So much so that when, the family would try to have conversations later and Spanish would be so difficult as a result and then it made them feel less a part of things. 

Jeanine: Yes. 

Zibby: Talk about that moment. 'cause I feel like in a way that was a pivotal moment for the family. 

Jeanine: It was, and that was a moment again, from my own childhood.

So I did not expect to feel emotional answering this question. But Spanish was my first language. I was born in Spain and to a Puerto Rican father. So my mother is white, but, they saw the opportunity to have, bilingual kids and they took it. So we spoke Spanish first. And when I came, when we came to the United States, we moved to California and it was the seventies and people were different than, and a little mean.

They're still mean sometimes, but my brother was in, first or second grade. He's three years older than me and he had a hard time in school and his teacher called him stupid. And he was grade level in every way, but he did not speak good English. And so my dad got into it with the teacher.

The family story goes that he called the teacher stupid because he, she couldn't recite her colors in Spanish, and apparently her name was. Mrs. Garcia, which is an extra level of irony to this story. But yeah, he pulled my brother outta that school and then they came home and said, no more Spanish at home.

We have to kick it up into English here. And we lost our language, all three of us. And to this day, my brother, who at one point in his life could not speak English. Doesn't have a word of Spanish, not a word. So I spent like the last 10 years of my life studying Spanish. I am conversationally adept at this point.

I will never say fluent. I'm not fluent, but I can hold my own in a conversation with Spanish. But I am aware that my Spanish is broken. And so one of the things that happened in the Wake of American dirt was that I was ridiculed for my broken Spanish and to be someone who, at the two bookends of my life, early in my life, I was in a position where I was made to feel ashamed or humiliated for not speaking English, and then 40 years later to be made to feel humiliated because I didn't speak Spanish well enough.

That also was like a major entryway into this book for me. I was like, how can both of these things be true in one life? And in fact, I think they're true very frequently in one life. Like I think that this is a thing that many Latino people contend with and many people who are bicultural or grow up with an identity that is not simple.

I think it's quite, I think there's a lot in here that people will relate to whether or not they're Puerto Rican, whether or not they're Latino, whether or not they're bicultural. I think there are ways in which women in particular are always made to feel as though no matter what they're doing it wrong.

And that is at the crux of this story, I think, like you can't win in a way. Where is the hope though? The hope is that at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. Because what really matters is the lives we build together. The love that we have for each other and the coming home to ourselves at a certain age, maybe where we understand that it doesn't matter at all what way other people perceive us because we know who we are.

And that, I think is where the hope is. I think Raphaella learns that in spades throughout the telling of this story. Ruth comes to that at some point, and with Daisy, she's young, she's she's on her way, but I think the three women in the story are all trying to come to the point with each other, where they understand each other and they discover through the hardships that they bear that all of the peripheral.

Worries that they have about the ways that they perform their identities or feel or inhabit their identities are really like absolutely secondary to their identity as a family. Rafaella's position as matriarch. Is the most important identity that she has. Ruth's position as daughter and mother.

Those are the things that matter most. 

Zibby: And we feel that so much in the love for family, in the fear in what do you do when you can't reach your child in an emergency? Some of these are the most sort of baseline unifying feelings there are. Like to be a parent, to love someone, to have that fear circulating.

Jeanine: Yeah. 

Zibby: And you make us feel that way. You put us like right there and.. 

Jeanine: I'm very sorry. 

Zibby: I know. Stop. Thanks a lot. 

Jeanine: I think it's a hallmark of all my books accidentally because I've had a lot of trauma in my life, which we don't need to get into. But I have had a lot and I've had that experience more than once in my life where you're bopping along on a regular day and there's a portal and you go through it and suddenly your life will never be the same. That sort of devastating moment where everything that matters can change in an instant seems to accidentally be at the heart of every novel that I've written, every and my memoir, which is about this very thing.

I think that's always gonna be there in the fiction that I am creating because it's so deeply a part of who I am as a writer. 

Zibby: And isn't that the thing that everyone in the world needs the most help with? That's why your fiction is so powerful. We all go through life and at any moment know if it hasn't happened to us yet, that it can, that from one moment to the next life can change completely.

And yet we have to walk around and pretend like that's not the case. Whether something happens to us or someone we love. 

Jeanine: Yeah. 

Zibby: So how do we hold that? And still go out and, email and do whatever we have to do in a day. 

Jeanine: Yeah, RUM helps.

Zibby: Janine, thank you so much. Thank you for coming on. Thank you for speak to me of home. Thank you for being such a warrior and not staying quiet. There are so many people who would have just said, I am out. I am done with this industry. I'm not publishing again, I'm not subjecting myself to all this, and you are back with this beautiful new book like you deserve a standing ovation. Thank you so much, and I'm so proud of you. 

Jeanine: Thank you. Thank you. It's been a pleasure.