How Victimhood Can Work For You! Andrew Boryga on his novel VICTIM.

The Unspeakable Podcast

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.8 • 784 Ratings

🗓️ 17 June 2024

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Paid subscribers get full access to my interview with Andrew Boryga.

The first portion of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here.

Who says you can’t write a novel skewing social justice excesses? Andrew Boryga has done just that — to critical acclaim. His debut novel VICTIM tells the story of Javier Perez, an academically gifted kid from The Bronx who lands at an elite college and soon discovers the advantages of playing up his disadvantages.

In this conversation, Andrew talks about the decade-long process of writing the book, his similarities to Javier, and how he feels about contemporary fiction and the literary world these days. He also discusses what it was like to shop the book to publishers and explores the question of whether a white author could get away with this kind of satire.

GUEST BIO

Andrew Boryga is a writer and editor who grew up in Bronx, NY and currently likes in Miami with his wife and two children. His debut novel VICTIM, was published in March by Doubleday.

Buy VICTIM here.

Follow his Substack here.

Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	We don't want our team to just be a bunch of white people from well-to-do families.
0:06.9	That's so like 20th century media, isn't it?
0:10.1	He looked at me pointedly.
0:12.1	I knew he was trying to earn points, trying to signal that he was hip and down with the beloved D-word.
0:17.6	By then it had spread from colleges and radical circles into corporate America,
0:21.5	into seemingly every institution there was. Like the quote-unquote conversation online,
0:26.5	it had become a wave, a wave that coincided so perfectly with my rise, you would have thought
0:31.7	I planned it.
0:35.1	Welcome to the unspeakable podcast. I'm your host, Megan Dom, or Down. The jury is still out on the
0:42.8	pronunciation of my name, and I think this summer I'm going to resolve it. I'm going to work through it,
0:48.1	and I'm going to make a decision, and I'm going to resolve it. Anyway, we're back. Last week
0:53.0	ended up being an unscheduled week off from the podcast. I've had
0:56.9	so many unspeak easy retreats lately that I found myself just totally underwater. Work-wise,
1:03.1	not only were we in Seattle, we were most recently in Chicago, where I'm happy to report that
1:09.3	our first ever co-ed unspeakeasy retreat was a
1:12.5	resounding success. I had no idea how it was going to go, but it was just great. We had three
1:19.2	guest speakers, Nadine Strassen, Eric Smith, and Lisa Sellin Davis, and that retreat was followed
1:25.0	by the Heterodox Academy Conference, also in Chicago, where I led a panel
1:29.2	discussion on women in heterodoxy that was recorded and that I hope to post for you here later this
1:36.2	summer. So there's a lot happening. Anyway, my guest is novelist Andrew Boriga. He is here to talk about
1:43.7	his debut novel, Victim,
1:45.5	which was published in March. If you happen to hear author Sherman Alexi on the podcast a couple of
	...

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