Andrew Boryga: Victim Writing Latinos

If you liked American Fiction, you’ll love Andrew Boryga’s debut novel Victim, from Doubleday. It follows the career of Javier Perez, who learns at an early age thebenefits—and devastating consequences—of writing about one’s traumas and victimization.High school teachers encourage “Javi” to write about how tough things are for him, so he could get into college. It worked. At Cornell, he wrote stories about race on campus, and his personal experience with race. After graduation, his blossoming career asa writer was based on telling the gritty stories his editors found compelling. The problem was that much of what he wrote was untrue. His family, friends, and an old lover don’t understand why he opted fort hese false accounts of his life. But you’re just going to have to read Victim in order to find out how it all blows up in his face, and what lessons he has learned, if any.
In this second episode of Writing Latinos, Boryga describes how he arrived at the idea to write Victim, his thoughts about the relationship between his life and the characters he invented, and speculation about how Victim might be read in the post-affirmativeaction era. Boryga is a Miami-based writer who grew up in the Bronx, where muchof the action inVictimtakes place