Gather round the campfire, children, and I’ll tell you a spooky, scary story about witches and the hunting of them. 

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It was a time of turmoil and terror. A deadly plague cast its shadow over the world, killing by the millions. Children turned on their parents, and neighbors turned on neighbors. In the streets, in the dark, a screaming mob ran with torches held aloft, touching them to anything they wanted to burn — and they wanted to burn everything. There was something rotten in this world, something rotting, a deep evil in need of rooting out. And here, our warriors came to understand that the problem was witches. Scores of them. They walked among us, sowing the seeds of chaos and catastrophe wherever they went. They would destroy us if we let them, and so they had to be destroyed. They were mostly women, as witches tend to be. 

They also mostly worked in publishing.

Of course, I speak of the year 2020, at the height of the nationwide identitarian reckoning that was really more like a purge, in both the Maoist and punk-dystopian franchise sense. Those who were seen as representatives of this -ism or that -phobia — or even just the ones still clinging to such grotesque and outdated ideals as free speech, equal opportunity, and the right of artists to imagine outside their own experience — were either on the chopping block, or performing elaborate apology and atonement rituals trying to keep themselves off it.

And nowhere was this authoritarian zeal more palpable than in the places where culture was created: media, academia, the arts, and the publishing houses. 2020 was when food writer Alison Roman was professionally defenestrated for (not inaccurately) describing multimillionaire decluttering expert Marie Kondo as a sellout. It was the year when a retrospective of artist Philip Guston’s work was canceled because some of his paintings contained critical depictions of the Ku Klux Klan — a show that finally opened two years later with the addition of safety measures, including an “Emotional Preparedness” pamphlet penned by a trauma specialist, urging visitors to view the artworks only with extreme caution.

And it was, of course, the year of American Dirt. For those who missed this saga (or have intentionally and understandably memory-holed it), American Dirt is the now-infamous work of author Jeanine Cummins, a literary thriller about a woman and her young son fleeing a vengeful cartel boss by jumping aboard a freight train called La Bestia, a real-life transport that rattles toward the U.S. border with migrants clinging desperately to its roof. The novel garnered a seven-figure deal and a tsunami of advance buzz: a film adaptation was already in development a full year before the release, Oprah selected the novel for her book club, and a cover blurb from Don Winslow announced it as “the Grapes of Wrath of our time.”

But with buzz comes buzzards, and it was clear from the outset that this was a hazard of which both Cummins and her publisher were well aware. When American Dirt was released, it included an apologetic author’s note in an apparent effort to preempt certain criticisms by having Cummins state them first. She felt conflicted about writing this story, she explained; she even wondered, at times, if “someone slightly browner” would have done it better.

Maybe you remember this; maybe you don’t. But if you have even a passing familiarity with this cultural moment, you know exactly what happened next. Critics, far from being placated by Cummins’s privilege acknowledgment, excoriated the book for its racism and the author for being a cultural appropriator who had stolen a story that didn’t belong to her.

Ironically, this did nothing to harm the book, which became a massive bestseller with a devoted readership who not only seemed to have no notion of the controversy but surely wouldn’t have cared if they did. But the author was another story: Cummins’s tour was canceled amid threats of violence, her Oprah appearance was turned into a public struggle session, and she retreated from public life. The cherry on top of this depraved sundae came several months later when writer Myriam Gurba, whose vitriolic review of American Dirt was the first spark in its eventual cancellation inferno, was awarded a book deal somewhere north of $250,000 — understood by pretty much everyone to be more like a thinly veiled bounty, collected in exchange for the destruction of Cummins’s reputation.

But the reason to retell this story now is not to indulge in nostalgia for outrages past. It’s because Cummins’s cancellation appears to have finally run its course. As of this month, she’s back on the literary scene with a new book, her first since American Dirt, titled Speak to Me of Home. 

The novel is a multigenerational saga, described as “a striking, resonant examination of marriage, family, and identity.” It is also, undeniably, a knock at the door of the culturati who ran Cummins out of town on a rail five years ago — and in this, it has been at least a partial success. Among those heralding the release of Speak to Me of Home is the New York Times, whose generous interview with Cummins elegantly sidesteps any mention of the paper’s significant role in the smear campaign against her (including commissioning a second, scathing review of American Dirt in 2020, after the first, by author Lauren Groff, was deemed problematically laudatory). Other reviews, including from Slate’s Laura Miller, have gone a step further, characterizing Speak to Me of Home as a deserved clapback at Cummins’s critics, whose derangement it is no longer taboo to acknowledge.

AMERICAN DIRT: WHEN COMPASSION GETS CANCELED

And yet, to say that this is a happy ending for Cummins, or even a vindicating one, would be to overstate it. Speak to Me of Home will not achieve the commercial success of American Dirt; it won’t even come close. As a story, it’s too much like the first cautious steps a circus performer takes on the high wire after a nearly career-ending fall: safe, timid, more concerned with avoiding catastrophe than putting on a good show. Indeed, this book seems designed less to thrill readers with a gripping and imaginative story and more to placate the critics who think such stories shouldn’t exist. Cummins dutifully stays in her lane this time around. The characters in Speak to Me of Home are largely American-born of Puerto Rican descent, just like her. And she reportedly worked with a sensitivity reader at her publisher’s insistence. For these efforts, she has been rewarded with mostly tepid reviews, including from the New York Times, in which a sniffy, more-Puerto-Rican-than-thou author derides the novel as “lacking the nuance of lived experience” and complains, among other things, that “Cummins’s characters seem unaware of the ubiquitous local distinctions between a vaguada, a tropical storm, a hurricane, a cyclone.” 

Of course, one way to look at this is that it’s a miracle Cummins has written another book at all — that she was able to write after what she went through. I’m not sure I could have done the same, and I hope I never have to. But if Cummins is the rare witch who made it off the pyre alive, there’s something tragic about the circumstances of her survival: to be allowed to come back, and even to tell stories again, but only if they’re stripped of the verve, the artistry, and the courage to imagine a life in someone else’s skin that made them so magical, and so dangerous, in the first place.

Kat Rosenfield is a culture writer and novelist. Her most recent book is You Must Remember This.