{"id":55979,"date":"2024-04-24T10:00:54","date_gmt":"2024-04-24T15:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/?p=55979"},"modified":"2026-01-16T20:10:49","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T02:10:49","slug":"andrew-boryga-on-victim","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/andrew-boryga-on-victim\/","title":{"rendered":"Andrew Boryga on \u201cVictim\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you liked American Fiction<\/em>, you\u2019ll love Andrew Boryga\u2019s debut novel Victim<\/em>, from Doubleday. It follows the career of Javier Perez, who learns at an early age the benefits\u2014and devastating consequences\u2014of writing about one\u2019s traumas and victimization. High school teachers encouraged \u201cJavi\u201d 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 as a 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\u2019t understand why he opted for these false accounts of his life. But you\u2019re just going to have to read Victim<\/em> 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<\/em>, Boryga describes how he arrived at the idea to write Victim<\/em>, his thoughts about the relationship between his life and the characters he invented, and speculation about how Victim <\/em>might be read in the post\u2013affirmative action era. Boryga is a Miami-based writer who grew up in the Bronx, where much of the action in Victim <\/em>takes place<\/p>\n

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