Before signing an open letter asking Oprah Winfrey to rescind her endorsement of Jeanine Cummins’ “American Dirt,” her latest book club pick, Jose Antonio Vargas spent the day digging around on You…
, and I was listening to them thinking, what would Toni Morrison say about this moment? What would she say to Oprah Winfrey?”
No shortage of evidence indicates Winfrey’s commitment to the film prior to her sudden withdrawal. Numerous insiders close to the project tell Variety that a month before Harpo executives saw the final cut of “On the Record” last October, Winfrey screened a version of the film and sent it to artist John Legend, with the hope that he would contribute an end credits song.
Later in her Jan. 21 CBS appearance, joined by Cummins, Winfrey announced that the Apple program about “American Dirt” would be filmed in some part at the U.S.-Mexico border. The imprimatur, in conjunction with hype the novel had already received, helped propel the book to the highest echelon of the Amazon charts. The novel later debuted on the New York Times best-seller list at No.
Winfrey had, on Jan. 26, placed on her book club’s Instagram a video in which she said, “It has become clear to me from the outpouring of very passionate opinion that this selection has struck a deeper chord,” and promised a “deeper, more substantive discussion” taking on the idea of who has the right to tell what story. Winfrey’s endorsement acted as an accelerant to sales and to criticism alike; Flatiron Books, Cummins’ publisher, canceled the author’s tour, citing death threats.
Winfrey is now stuck in this conversation. Her daily talk show, which ended in 2011, was a massive megaphone both for communicating what she wanted to communicate and in changing the conversation. Bound to produce something about a novel that’s both a hit and politically divisive, Winfrey will still be talking about “American Dirt” and issues of representation in March — although perhaps not in the tone or tenor she could have hoped for when reviving her book club for Apple.
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