"People of color, or people from a “marginalized background” were becoming commodities": a conversation with Andrew Boryga

Andrew Boryga's debut novel VICTIM will blow up soon in a bookstore near you. Let us tell you all about it.

Andrew Boryga is a writer, editor, and author, who hails from the Bronx, New York. He lives in Miami, Florida with his family. His first novel Victim will be released by Doubleday in March 2024 - hit that link to pre-order it.

Oh, fine, have another pre-order link.

And here is VICTIM on NetGalley, if you want to read an ARC.

Andrew began his career writing for a local newspaper in the Bronx at age 16. By age 18, he worked his way into an internship with The New York Times. Since then, his non-fiction writing has appeared frequently in the Times, as well as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The Daily Beast. He also has a Substack called Dwell.

TOPICS INCLUDE: Tokenization, literary hustlers, literary impostors who kept the charade running for a shocking amount of time, Jayson Blair, Jess Krug, George Santos, going too easy on a fictional character out of a desire to protect yourself, where the hell “LatinX” came from and why it never got any traction offline, the city of Miami, the Bronx, Andrew’s start as a reporter, “caring too much about attention and publishing something to acclaim”, “caring a lot about Twitter”, getting attention because of one’s “POC appeal” and how to move past it to write a far better book in return.

Enjoy.

Photo by Esther Jiao on Unsplash

There's a scene in VICTIM that feels like a good starting point for this chat  - your narrator Javi is tasked with writing about the way a group of Bronx teenagers are reacting to the murder of a person of color, but (a) this writing gig is happening only because this particular act has been caught on video and the dead person's name is a trending topic, and (b) the real reaction from these teens would be a far more compelling story (not to mention authentic). Still, Javi makes up a story to please his magazine editor - he knows what the magazine wants to hear from a "righteous minority writer". But this is a path he chose for himself. 

I'd like to know how much you refined Javier's character over time. You certainly strike an impressive balance between "literary hustler out for himself" and "some guy who could still back away from this anytime". 

I’m so glad that balance came off on the page. It was certainly intentional. I want Javi to be someone that makes you cringe. Someone that you find terrible, but also, someone whose motives you can kind of understand, and even empathize with at some level. In other words, complex. I love characters like that in fiction. I find them far more compelling than characters clearly drawn to be “good” or “bad.”

To answer your question: I spent a lot of time refining Javi’s character to accomplish this. Ten years. He was first born out of some short stories I wrote in college that attracted attention and won a few writing awards. But back then Javi was way too passive. All of the action of the stories happened around Javi. He was never an active participant in anything. As I kept tinkering with different versions of the novel over the years, I realized the problem was that I was protecting Javi. I didn’t want to make him seem like a “bad guy”, mostly, because he was initially based off of a version of myself and I didn’t want readers to think I was “bad.” Javi started to take shape when I consciously made the decision to divorce himself from me. He’s not me, even though there are parts of him that are based off of me. I accept that some readers won’t believe that. But what can I do about it?

Coming to this understanding gave me freedom. I did a number of rewrites on the book, and focused on pulling out little pieces and hints of Javi’s character that were sort of coming through in the early versions, but that I was suppressing. Turns out he wasn’t as innocent and naive as I’d previously written him. He was kind of a dick. A charlatan. I saw bits of that con-man vibe peek through and began to pull on it and see where it led. But at the same time, his core, this kid who wanted to make it out by any means necessary, to achieve his idea of “success” was also there, too.

Throughout this process, the theme and plot of the story morphed. I was working on this from 2012 to 2022, during a period in which I watched the media, publishing, and larger society seemingly become obsessed with diversity, marginalized people, POC, or now, I guess, BIPOC, people (we’ve had so many names I can’t keep up). At first, this seemed like a welcome development. But slowly, I started to realize, and experience through my own dealings as a freelance journalist, that what was really happening was that people of color, or people from a “marginalized background” were becoming commodities. Trending topics. While I think some of the desire to elevate voices in these spaces was genuine, a lot of it had to do more with optics. To signal: we’re doing the right thing, without really trying to create any meaningful change. Tokenization.

I realized there was an opening for someone like Javi. Someone who was always interested in writing, and who came from a kind of messed up background, to capitalize on this. I loved the idea as soon as it came to me: A guy who leans into diversity obsession and pimps it. The concept felt fun and fresh, but also, it put Javi in the driver’s seat of something. Instead of hardships being pressed upon him, he was finally out there stirring the pot and creating trouble for himself.

Over the past couple decades, people have cared for literary impostors quite a bit. In part because there was a real appetite for takedowns (still is!), and occasionally because of the audacity of the hoaxes themselves. It takes A LOT OF EFFORT to make up nonfiction and succeed in getting THAT approved by a number of professionals. Is there any real-life hoax that made an impression on you, as an author, over the time you were working on VICTIM? Or even earlier than that? 

I’ve always been fascinated by these types of people. On the one hand, like you said, it takes a lot of effort to keep up these charades. I can’t imagine all the work that goes into that, as well as what they must feel and think when they’re alone, living with their lie. But I’m also fascinated because, in many cases, these people are just like Javi: seeing an opportunity and looking for a way to exploit it. Even though I don’t agree with what they did, often, I can see why they did it.

People like Jayson Blair made a lasting impression on me. Here is a guy who clearly was doing what he was doing to try and move up the ranks in a place, The New York Times, that has historically had issues with giving real, meaningful opportunities to writers of color. I know because I worked there. I saw it for myself. I can imagine what Blair did started small, but, obviously, by the end snowballed into something he couldn’t control. I actually skimmed through some of Blair’s memoir as research for Victim.

Then there was Jess Krug, the George Washington University professor who pretended to be an Afro-Puerto Rican for years. She even adopted a whole fake Bronx, Nuyorican dialect. I mean, talk about commitment! It was so interesting when she decided to cancel herself. She saw the writing on the wall and said, this is my best way out. She was probably right. We don’t remember her as much now.

George Santos came about after the book was pretty much done, but he’s also someone I think about, too. He is far more audacious about his hustle, and really has a set of balls on him. I mean, he just leans in and doesn’t give a fuck about how damning the evidence is. There is something fascinating about that.

I think it is clear that there is this spirit out there. And likely always has been. I mean political candidates always do this shit. Every year, we hear of people talking about their past experiences and playing things up and then there is some big piece saying, well, wait a minute, it didn’t really happen like that. Even Biden isn’t immune to it. He’s had his own documented run of exaggerating claims about his past that proved deadly to his first presidential run in the ‘80s. Trump, I mean, come on, his whole life story is built on bigging himself up to be something he really isn’t.

Speaking of "hoaxes", there's an element of the JT Leroy story that stuck with me - what "JT" wrote had been deemed good enough to publish in book form, way before the "former street hustler, HIV positive, super abused kid" dramatis persona took over. Yet, "JT" was established as some sort of persona very early on, and very few people seemed to own up to their role in the imbroglio - "did they love the material because they thought it came from a street-wise wunderkind ? Would they have even liked the material, had they known it was just a bunch of stories from a very different author?"  

VICTIM walks a fine line here as well. Javier is ... kind of pushed to embellish his life story right out the gates - to the point I don't genuinely know if he would have been given a chance to get published otherwise. Do you have a strong opinion on this? 

I don’t know a whole lot about JT Leroy, to be honest. But I’m grateful, again, that you appreciate the fine line that VICTIM walks. I wanted it to be that way. I wanted people to read this and, at the end, especially after Javi’s sort of rant, try and figure out who is to blame here. Is Javi just a con-man? Or is he really just pimping the system that is provided to him? Is he wrong for doing that? Or is the game he’s playing corrupt at the core?

I tried to sort of play up both possibilities as much as possible, in an attempt to leave the reader thinking about those questions by the end. I don’t really feel it is my place, or fiction’s responsibility, to answer the questions. This isn’t a diatribe or an argumentative nonfiction book. It’s a novel. I think good novels are meant to bring up questions through characters and situations and make you think about them when you’re done.

One of the many ways VICTIM works is like a blueprint of how fast changes can happen in a cultural landscape - and how shallow the new rules can be. I remember the moment words like "Latinx" were being picked up by well-meaning Very Online people IN EUROPE. (It was 2018, believe it or not.) In retrospect, these people were picking up their cues from the online U.S. Discourse, but they probably didn't have many Latino friends, and they just thought it was "the done thing" now. (Same with the sudden online discourse devoted to one single issue that becomes omnipresent: Javi pays lip service to "food deserts in the Bronx" even though his own experience has been quite different.) How mindful have you been in tracking all these moments, big or small? Did something ever ring out as especially hollow to you at the time, or has it been more of an "accumulation" experience you had to un-pack later on? 

The Latinx thing was interesting from the start. I actually tried to write about it back in, like, 2017, but was shot down by big pubs because it seemed too wonky at the time. I was trying to explain that this would be a thing, but they didn’t believe me, or perhaps didn’t think I had the chops to pull it off. I was interested in the idea of Latinx when it first emerged, and I read Ed Morales’ book on it. But at the time I was living in Miami, where I still live, and where, basically, aside from the universities and hyper-educated people, nobody says the word. Like, nobody. This is a city that is more than 70 percent Latino.

Here we all refer to each other by the nations we hail from. I’m Puerto Rican, my wife is Colombian, my neighbor down the hall Dominican, and so on. If we have to refer to ourselves in some collective manner, Latino is what mostly everyone uses. So, it was weird, and almost felt gaslighting to see people pretend everyone uses this word and that this is how the larger Latino community prefers to be referred to. It was great to see Pew Research, a truly invaluable institution in these odd times we’re in, basically debunk the idea that Latinx is a thing in a 2020 study.

But there were a lot of other things that I started to track sometime around 2014 or 2015. The whole BIPOC thing is another one. I still don’t understand where the fuck that came from. It sounds like a cy-borg. And, again, I don’t really know anyone, outside of hyper-educated spaces, that uses the term.

I think a lot of this came to a head in 2020, following George Floyd’s death and the protests and riots. I was already writing the version of VICTIM that exists now at that time, but seeing everything that happened then, all the diversity statements from corporations, people signing onto things simply because it was trendy, and then discarding them when it became not-trendy shortly after, it was all proof to me that a lot of these platitudes and virtues are hollow. After all that talk about change, there wasn’t one meaningful reform passed. All the same problems largely still exist. And meanwhile, we have all this documented evidence about a lot of the money donated during that time going towards things that had nothing to do with improving the criminal justice system.

There are organizations out there really, truly, dedicated to change. I've worked for some. There are activists out there who really do live this shit and care about seeing their communities uplifted and devote their lives to it. There are academics who want to do important work, even when it is contentious, but in the spirit of getting things done. There are a lot of excellent journalists looking to tell us the truth. But, let’s be real. There are also a lot of charlatans, too. A lot of people who have their own angle, and who see victims and social issues as useful to their cause.

This is your first novel, but you racked up an impressive number of writing credits before getting here. Has there ever been a moment you might have felt pressured to lie about your own background, either to perhaps get a book deal sooner, or because someone else was touting it as a surefire path to bigger and better things ? 

Ha! Fair question. I was expecting to get it eventually. While writing, in fact, I thought to myself, well, people are going to think I did this. I haven't outright fabricated stuff like Javi, but I definitely have understood it would be a lot easier for me to tell certain kinds of stories about my family or my past or my community. Editors I’ve worked with or who have solicited me have often come looking for “gritty” stories, and it is common practice in the journalism industry, especially while writing about crime or injustice, to look for the most compelling victims. To paint the most emotionally resonant story possible. Nuance, for a while, lost its luster. Though I think there are some good indications that this is starting to change.

Back when I started reporting, I saw pretty early on that there was interest in me from editors simply because of the fact that I actually lived in the Bronx and could move through Bronx streets easily. I never had a problem getting people to talk to me, and when I showed up at a scene or event, people didn’t really think I was a reporter. I didn’t look like someone who lived in Williamsburg and was dispatched to this foreign patch of the earth to get “color.” So I definitely realized, early on, that this was valuable. But I tried my best to use that skill set to get my foot in the door and tell stories I’m still proud of to this day. Unfortunately, a lot of those stories were never popular. They didn't get a lot of clicks. I think my insistence on not telling another type of story, the flat, “gritty” stories the editors wanted, probably hurt my career prospects.

When it comes to fiction, I knew in the beginning that a certain type of “I made it out the hood” novel would probably sell pretty quickly and get some attention. Especially in diversity's heyday, somewhere around the 2014 to 2019 or so period. I tried to write that novel for a while. But it was super fucking boring. Still, a version of it got some attention. And there was one point where I almost had this agent who was clearly interested in me because of my “POC appeal” and I probably would have sold a version of that sappy book. Thankfully, I had good people around me who helped me stay away from that and allowed me to refocus myself.

The real issue was that, at the time, I cared too much about attention and publishing something to acclaim. I cared a lot about Twitter. And so I was basically gunning to make it all happen quickly. Thankfully, it never happened. And when it didn’t, it gave me the permission to abandon this book I was trying to force and have fun writing one that I wasn’t even sure would ever see the light of day. Life stuff helped, too. Renewing my faith in God. Getting married. Having kids. Building a whole ass life outside of writing.

Writing, as a result, feels fun again. It's not my everything anymore. I don’t feel that pressure anymore to get something done by a certain time frame or to receive a certain accolade. That is why this shit took ten years. But I’m glad it did. A lot of the journey bled into Javi’s journey, and his fervent desire for immediate success. Because I went through a version of that, I could really understand him and, as a result, make him come off in a way on the page that it is hard to not feel for him.

AND NOW, YOU CAN:

Pre-order Victim now;

Request an ARC for VICTIM on NetGalley;

Read Andrew’s Substack, Dwell.