I wrote a book about that. ... Having a Puerto Rican grandmother, as well as a husband who was an undocumented … As millions pine for their COVID-19 vaccinations, a lucky few are getting bumped to the front of the line because of extra doses that must get used. But the wash of bullets that follows is loud, booming, and thudding, clack-clacking with helicopter speed. He doesn’t immediately understand that it is a bullet at all, and it’s only luck that it doesn’t strike him between the eyes…. “The heroes grow only more heroic, the villains more villainous.”. It personifies the will of the mothers we see in flashes on TV, running with their toddlers in their arms, the ones for whom “to go home” means to hand their children to executioners. We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from. In it, the Chicana writer Myriam Gurba takes Cummins to task for “(1) appropriating genius works by people of color; (2) slapping a coat of mayonesa on them to make palatable to taste buds estados-unidenses and (3) repackaging them for mass racially ‘colorblind’ consumption.”, Gurba describes American Dirt as “trauma porn that wears a social justice fig leaf,” arguing, “American Dirt fails to convey any Mexican sensibility. Jeanine Cummins' new book "American Dirt" has been surrounded by controversy. Review: A family travel memoir makes a timely pitch for personal risk. Charles Wheelan’s “We Came, We Saw, We Left” charts the Wheelan family’s frantic global “gap year” — infections, iffy street food, tantrums and all. Before the day that changed their lives forever, Lydia owned a bookstore, where she befriended a frequent customer, an elegant bespectacled man named Javier who shared her love of certain novels, who wrote bad poetry and shared that with her too. It said its lease price made the location unsustainable. Reporting To You “American Dirt” Tries To Pretend That Immigration Isn’t Political. Cummins had written a story that was not hers — and, according to many readers of color, she didn’t do a very good job of it. I wished someone slightly browner than me would write it,” Cummins says. “I got sexually assaulted by a serial killer in 1996. So last week, when Oprah announced that American Dirt would be the next book discussed in her book club, the news was treated not as the crown jewel in the coronation of the novel of the season, but as a slightly awkward development for Oprah. Oprah ended up qualifying her choice, maintaining that she would keep the book in her club, but change her planned coverage of it to a series of conversations with those on “both sides” of the issue. California is running critically low on COVID-19 vaccines as people vie for shots. Gurba says she’s had a mostly positive response to her review, “except for the death threats.” She maintains that American Dirt is a very bad book. “I was sure I was the wrong person to review this book” as a white person, she writes, and became even more sure as she learned that Cummins herself was white. “American Dirt” is a vital, well-crafted, compelling and compassionately told story. “You know better, you know how dangerous the United States of America is, and you still chose to frame this place as a sanctuary. Biden’s LGBTQ rights executive order and the transphobic backlash, explained. Jeanine Cummins’ book was enthusiastically endorsed by Stephen King, Ann Patchett, Sandra Cisneros, and was chosen the selection for Oprah Winfrey’s book club, a … And so she spent years working on this book, traveling on both sides of the border and interviewing the people she met there. Miller apologized for specific issues people raised with the book and its rollout, including saying Cummins' husband was a undocumented immigrant without specifying he is … ABOUT; BOOKS; EVENTS; NEWS; BOOK GROUPS; CONTACT; A NOTE FROM JEANINE “Masterful” SANDRA CISNEROS “It’s been a long time since I turned pages as fast as I did with American Dirt” JOHN GRISHAM “Both a moral compass and a riveting read” ANN PATCHETT #1 New York Times … But now, it’s no longer happening. Nevertheless, when Lydia’s husband, Sebastián, a career journalist, writes a profile/exposé of La Lechuza, Lydia convinces both Sebastián and herself that the article will appeal to Javier’s vanity, that she and her family will be safe. Because it also examines, with sensitivity, care, and complexity of thought, immense, soul-obliterating trauma and its aftermath. The two runaways are tracked by the cartel from a hotel room in Acapulco onto a bus bound for Chilpancingo, then smuggled in a van into Mexico City and onto La Bestia, the freight train that rumbles up through the desert to Tijuana, Nogales and Juárez, where coyotes wait to take them across the border. Trolls were not happy. Rigoberto Gonzalez reviews Jeanine Cummins’ ‘American Dirt.’ The novel tells the story of a mother and son on Mexico’s migrant trail in search of a new life. That made her uncomfortable. NEW YORK (AP) — The publisher of Jeanine Cummins’ controversial novel “American Dirt” has canceled the remainder of her promotional tour, citing concerns for her safety. The controversial, cross-genre novel combines elements of a commercial thriller, literary fiction, suspense, and romance. The story of American Dirt has now become a story about cultural appropriation, and about why publishing as an industry chose this particular tale of Mexican migration to champion. US publisher Flatiron has cancelled American Dirt author Jeanine Cummins’ promotional tour in the US after "threats to booksellers and the author".. As a formerly undocumented Mexican immigrant, I’ve longed for more books telling our stories to be published and celebrated. They progress like this: There are plenty of authors of color writing smart, good stories about their experiences. However, since its release, some critics have voiced concerns over what they consider to be … The novel follows a mother and her 8-year-old son as they attempt to make it to the U.S. border while fleeing cartel violence. Groff praises the novel’s “very forceful and efficient drive” and its “propulsive” pacing, but she also finds herself “deeply ambivalent” about it. Apple TV+ March 4, 2020, 11:18 PM UTC Both Khakpour and Gurba argue that American Dirt was appealing to publishers because white people tend to be most comfortable reading about people of color as objects of suffering. Jeanine Cummins is not a Mexican national. Through their grief, Lydia and Luca embark on a harrowing quest to seek refuge, as undocumented immigrants, in the United States. As Jeanine Cummins was writing American Dirt, her much-hyped novel about a Mexican woman and her child who flee gang violence and illegally cross the border into the United States, she must have imagined scores of suburban American women lounging on overstuffed couches and sipping rosé with fellow book clubbers as they discussed her terrifying melodrama. American Dirt (Tinder Press, £14.99) is out now, buy it here . Here’s what we know. The second is a structural question: Why did the publishing industry choose this particular book — about brown characters, written by a white woman for a white audience — to throw its institutional force behind? Oprah, lounging in a silk robe, sipping her morning coffee, copies of Groff's and Seghal's reviews of AMERICAN DIRT on the coffee table. I tried to start a pandemic pod for my 5-year-old. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today, from as little as $3. But you would not know as much from the Book Review’s Twitter account, which posted a link to Groff’s published review with a quote that appears nowhere within it. Jeanine Cummins should take heart, and she should keep writing. She strongly felt that this author had the right to write such a scene, she says, “because he wrote it well. American Dirt: In Jeanine Cummins' new book, writing about the border crisis, hoping to break down walls As a nonimmigrant, Jeanine Cummins was reluctant at first to write an entire novel from the perspective of Mexican migrants, for fear of getting it wrong, or appearing to be opportunistically seizing on a humanitarian crisis. Trying to create a social pod so her daughter could again play with her friends led this mom down a rabbit hole of awkwardness, rejection and frustration. Critics are calling it trauma porn. Her husband is from Ireland and was an undocumented immigrant in the US for 10 years. 6 writers chart a course. Review: I was super excited to read American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins because of the controversy surrounding it. You just have to do it well — and part of doing it well involves treating your characters as human beings, and not luxuriating in and fetishizing their trauma. This peculiar book flounders and fails.”. Get our newsletter in your inbox twice a week. “Allow me to take this one for the team,” Sehgal wrote. I have read several studies about the resilience of women in the face of atrocity, of genocide, of unthinkable cruelty, of rape and murder and dismemberment, of the various tortures powerful men have been inventing for centuries. She is a U.S. citizen of mixed ethnicity with family roots in Puerto Rico who writes in the book, “I married an undocumented immigrant.” American Dirt is explicitly addressed to non-Mexican readers by a non-Mexican author, and it is framed as a story that will remind those readers that Mexican migrants are human beings. Jeanine Cummins’ fourth book, “American Dirt,” is a surprising departure from her previous novels, which mined her Irish ancestry for substance and inspiration. To board the train, they must find a spot where it is unprotected by fences; they must run to grab on before the train speeds up, scramble to the top without being sucked under and cut in half, strap themselves to the roof of a boxcar and duck for every tunnel. But this time, “when they received my review, they rejected it, telling me I’m not famous enough to be so mean. The novel follows a mother and her 8-year-old son as they attempt to make it … There is a rash of screams too, but that noise is short-lived, soon exterminated by the gun fire. She had a stereotype of what Mexicans are. The Standard hotel in West Hollywood is shutting down. People sometimes flatten critiques like the one American Dirt is facing into a pat declaration that no one is allowed to write about groups of which they are not a member, which opponents can then declare to be nothing but rank censorship and an existential threat to fiction: “If we have permission to write only about our own personal experience,” Lionel Shriver declared in the New York Times in 2016, “there is no fiction, but only memoir.”. Please also read our Privacy Notice and Terms of Use, which became effective December 20, 2019. Biden’s planned actions on reproductive health care, explained. Spoiler alert! Flatiron announced a first print run of 500,000 copies. The Standard hotel in West Hollywood on the Sunset Strip is set to close Friday. But she confused herself. The release of Jeanine Cummins' new novel, American Dirt, on Tuesday was paired with the announcement of it receiving the much-coveted honor of being Oprah Winfrey's book club pick. Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that empowers you through understanding. Here’s how it went wrong. But it wasn’t long before Lydia realized that her friend Javier and the leader of the cartel Los Jardinaros — the man they called La Lechuza for his owlish glasses, the most feared man in the whole state of Guerrero — were one and the same. So begins the 2,645-mile, run-for-their-lives journey of 8-year-old Luca and his mother, Lydia, away from a family barbecue turned crime scene, away from their comfortable middle-class life in Acapulco, to el norte, and the possibility of a new life across the border. Jeanine Cummins is the author of four books: the bestselling memoir A Rip in Heaven, and the novels The Outside Boy, The Crooked Branch, and American Dirt.She lives in New York with her husband … “They feel like they learn something, like by reading these accounts they are somehow participating in helping the world they usually feel so helpless about.”, Gurba says many white people expect to see her enact such narratives herself and become angry when she doesn’t. “While we’re forced to contend with impostor syndrome,” she writes, “dilettantes who grab material, style, and even voice are lauded and rewarded.”, Gurba originally wrote her review for Ms. magazine, but it never appeared there. Jeanine Cummins’s book tour behind her novel “American Dirt” was set to be a magnet for intense debate and controversy. What is great about how hard this novel is to put down is the hope that it will not be put down. Most of the subjects in that book are Mexicans and Chicanx. Groff, who is white, was less critical of American Dirt than Sehgal was, but her review was far from an unmitigated rave: It wrestles with a number of questions over whether Cummins had the right to write this book. "American Dirt" by Jeanine Cummins. Kellyanne Conway’s 16-year-old daughter provided an ugly look into their family life. Gurba’s review established the counternarrative on American Dirt, but that narrative didn’t become the dominant read until January 17. Book review by Dinh. However, Javier is revealed to be the kingpin of a drug cartel. (It is worth noting at this juncture that plenty of people who are slightly browner than Cummins have in fact written about Mexican migration.) Are you an author? Such salaries mean that the kind of people who work in publishing tend to be the kind of people who can afford to work in publishing: those who are carrying little student debt and who can rely on their parents to supplement their salaries as necessary. We need to see immigrants not as, in Cummins’ words, “an invading mob of resource-draining criminals,” or “a sort of helpless, impoverished, faceless brown mass, clamoring for help at our doorstep” but as “people with the agency to make their own decisions, people who can contribute to their own bright futures, and to ours, as so many generations of oft-reviled immigrants have done before them.”. It aspires to be Día de los Muertos but it, instead, embodies Halloween.” Most especially, she critiques the way Cummins positions the US as a safe haven for migrants, a utopia waiting for them outside of the bloody crime zone of Mexico. The story of escape is suspenseful and compelling, but it's manipulative and deeply inappropriate for Jeanine Cummins to tell. But as the publication date approached, the narrative around American Dirt has changed. Why has publishing chosen to allocate its resources in this way? Ladee Hubbard’s second novel, “The Rib King,” features a Black servant who finds himself on a sauce label — and another who controls her own destiny. Because he was a good writer, a thoughtful writer, and that scene had a reason to exist besides morbid curiosity or a petulant delight in shrugging on and off another’s pain.”, Brandon Taylor made a similar point at LitHub earlier in 2016, arguing that successful writers have to be able to write with empathy. We are thrilled that some of the biggest names in Latinx literature are championing American Dirt.”. When Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen” came out, I suggested that in order for U.S. citizens to get their driver’s licenses renewed, they should have to answer a few simple questions about that book. It is also about teeth-gritting, unromantic perseverance. It is only a matter of days after the article is published that the bullets fly outside the bathroom window, and when the assault is over, sixteen members of Lydia’s family, including Sebastián, are dead, she and Luca spared only by the accidental timing of the bathroom break. Her own life story, of marrying an undocumented man, would have provided a lens of empathy for white readers. Now, apply that scenario to the literary equation [American Dirt has] presented.”. (Arguably, Groff is being truer to the aims of American Dirt’s genre than Sehgal was, but given that American Dirt is a book whose front cover contains a blurb calling it “a Grapes of Wrath for our times,” it’s hard to say that Sehgal’s expectations for literary prose were unmerited.) “American Dirt” humanizes, better than any news story, the children our government is currently incarcerating, without blankets, without toothbrushes, without flu shots, without hope of seeing their parents ever again. They are arguing that instead, American Dirt has done the opposite of what Greenidge applauded that lynching scene for accomplishing. Review: Uplift or minstrelsy? And there is very good reason for that assumption: Publishing is an extremely white industry. I thought it again with the publication of Colson Whitehead’s “Underground Railroad.” Likewise, “American Dirt.”, It is hard to dispute the fact that our collective blindness and amnesia as an electorate have caught up to us. It’s the great world novel! How a 22-year-old L.A. native became Biden’s inauguration poet. American Dirt: In Jeanine Cummins' new book, writing about the border crisis, hoping to break down walls As a nonimmigrant, Jeanine Cummins was reluctant at first to write an entire novel from the perspective of Mexican migrants, for fear of getting it wrong, or appearing to be opportunistically seizing on a humanitarian crisis. I defied it. “She insisted that I didn’t look or act Mexican and that I had confused her. It’s in the spirit of that reading — of American Dirt as a failure in empathy, as trauma porn — that Gurba noted on Twitter that an early book party that Flatiron Books created for Cummins featured barbed wire centerpieces. 15: Luis J. Rodriguez discusses “From Our Land to Our Land” (date updated).March 11: Jeanine Cummins discusses “American Dirt.”Info: latimes.com/bookclub, Move over, Bernie Sanders: Poet Amanda Gorman is the new meme queen. But the most prominent voices in this debate have tended to say that it is entirely possible to write about a particular group without belonging to it. The Trump name used to be synonymous with success and wealth. Jeanine Cummins' new book has been mired in controversy. To move forward from divisiveness and hate into a collective response to the calamities befalling us, we need to own our past as well as our present. How will Trump handle life without Twitter and Facebook? (For most authors, a print run of 20,000 is pretty good.) The narratives Gurba and Khakpour suggest both assume that the decision-makers on American Dirt were white. “‘Mijo, ven,’ she says, so quietly that Luca doesn’t hear her.”. Though several Mexican American and Latino writers (Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez) have come out in support of the book, hoping that it will effect policy change, Bowles wrote that “to elevate this inauthentic book written by someone outside our community is to slap our collective face.”, Cummins anticipates this controversy in the book’s afterword: “When I decided to write this book, I worried that my privilege would make me blind to certain truths, that I’d get things wrong, as I may well have….”. The book has been criticized because the author is white, not an immigrant, and her her use of stereotypes exploits Mexican immigrants, in addition to depicting an unauthentic story. Claudia Conway’s TikToks about her mother’s alleged abuse are more complicated than they seem. Update: This story was originally published on January 22, 2020. Jeanine Cummins: ‘I didn’t know if I had the right to tell the story’ ... I’m married to an Irishman who was an undocumented immigrant for many years. It tells the story of a mother and son, Lydia and Luca, fleeing their home in Acapulco, Mexico, for the US after the rest of their family is murdered by a drug cartel. Lydia, Soledad and Rebeca are the embodiment of that resilience, of that determination. She lives in New York with her husband and two children. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. According to Book Review editor Pamela Paul, the tweet used language from an early draft of Groff’s review and was an unintentional error. They’re a fairly good illustration of what the phrase “trauma porn” means. Lydia’s willingness to kill or die for her son, and Soledad’s for her sister, serves to make them 21st century heroines. In her blurb for the book, the legendary Mexican American author Sandra Cisneros declared herself a fan, writing, “This book is not simply the great American novel; it’s the great novel of las Americas. And, putting aside questions of identity and Cummins’s stated objective, Sehgal finds that American Dirt fails to make the argument that its characters are human beings. And yet American Dirt, a novel written by a white woman for a white audience, is the book about people of color that landed the seven-figure advance and a publicity budget that could result in four articles in the New York Times. Jeanine Cummins ’ fourth book, ... Mexico, where Lydia Quixano Pérez’s husband and entire family – with the exception of her eight-year-old young son, Luca – are murdered by a drug cartel. Annette Gordon-Reed, Ayad Akhtar, Héctor Tobar, Martha Minow, David Kaye and Jonathan Rauch discuss the Jan. 6 riot and what we do about it. And mostly, those people tend to be white. It also encourages us to ask ourselves: How could we, under the current regime of terror on both sides of the border, do more to help those who are running for their lives? The national youth poet laureate read her galvanizing poem, ‘The Hill We Climb,’ just after Joe Biden was inaugurated as the 46th U.S. president. His presidency changed that. The institutional questions about American Dirt are more quantitative. In another New York Times essay in 2016, Kaitlyn Greenidge described reading a scene written by an Asian American man that described the lynching of a black man. "American Dirt," the new novel by Jeanine Cummins, traces the journey a mother and son make to the US, after … President of Maryland university offers inaugural poet Amanda Gorman a job via Twitter. Hitting the vaccine jackpot: Lucky few get leftover COVID-19 shots. She has two daughters and has been a foster parent. Customers Also Bought Items By Brit Bennett Fredrik Backman Kristin Hannah Lisa Jewell William Kent Krueger Lisa Wingate Read more. Before Luca can zip his pants, lower the lid, climb up to look out … the bathroom door swings open and Mami is there. In fact, she seemed to fetishize the pain of her characters at the expense of treating them as real human beings. I got paid $3,000 for my story,” Gurba says. This guide refers to the first US edition. Flatiron has issued an official apology for those centerpieces, saying, “We can now see how insensitive those and other decisions were, and we regret them.” But for critics of the novel, the central problem remains. “At worst, we perceive them [migrants] as an invading mob of resource-draining criminals, and, at best, a sort of helpless, impoverished, faceless brown mass, clamoring for help at our doorstep,” she writes. Any promotional events for Jeanine Cummins' highly anticipated — and then, highly condemned — novel will be replaced by town hall-style discussions between the author and her critics. It has been updated to include news of Cummins’s book tour cancellation, Oprah’s plan for discussing American Dirt as part of her book club, and Flatiron’s statement of apology for the barbed wire centerpieces. If you’re having a difficult time accessing the lives of people who are unlike you, then your work is not yet done.”, Critics of American Dirt are making the case that Cummins has failed to do the work of empathy. And some of American Dirt’s critics say they have received threats, too. Review: ‘American Dirt’s’ gripping story of escape falters amid moments of pandering. Sign up for the ABOUT; BOOKS; EVENTS; NEWS; BOOK GROUPS; CONTACT; A NOTE FROM JEANINE; Menu. As a result, publishing is predominantly staffed with well-meaning white people who, when looking for a book about the stories of people of color, can find themselves drawn toward one addressed specifically to white people — and who will lack the expertise to question that book’s treatment of its characters. In the wake of these reviews, the American Dirt controversy coalesced around two major questions. Groff spends much of her review wrestling with her responsibility as a white critic of a novel addressed to white people by a white author about the stories of people of color, and ends without arriving at a satisfying answer. Jeanine Cummins is not a Mexican national. Publishing is staffed almost entirely by white people — and in large part, that fact can be explained by publishing’s punishingly low entry-level salaries. A new collection of old Didion essays, called “Let Me Tell You What I Mean,” has been published. It sold to Flatiron Books at auction for a reported seven-figure advance. newsletter. Cummins also had her own experience of dealing with US immigration. The publisher of the controversial "American Dirt" book has canceled the remainder of author Jeanine Cummins’ promotional tour, citing concerns for … Lydia is a bookstore owner who never thought of herself as having anything in common with the migrants she sees on the news, but after she comes up with the plan of disguising herself by posing as a migrant, she realizes that it won’t really be a disguise: It’s who she is now. “American Dirt is a metaphor for all that’s wrong in Big Lit,” she says: “big money pushing big turds into the hands of readers eager to gobble up pity porn.”. That the book has failed to suggest “a reason to exist besides morbid curiosity or a petulant delight in shrugging on and off another’s pain.”. A job as an editorial assistant pays around $30,000, and it likely means living in New York City, where conservative estimates generally say you need an annual salary of about $40,000 before taxes to get by. Those barbed wire centerpieces are all about the aesthetic splendor of migrant trauma, about the idea of reveling in the thrill of the danger that actual human beings have to deal with every day, without ever worrying that you personally might be threatened. But on the internet and beyond, controversy was brewing. Jeanine Cummins’s novel American Dirt was a hit, then someone accused her of cultural appropriation. Another critic revealed that she’d written a review panning the book, too, and the magazine that commissioned her review killed it. Sehgal, who is of Indian descent, says she believes in the author’s right to write about “the other,” which she argues fiction “necessarily, even rather beautifully” requires. Cummins also says in the note that she recognizes that this story may not be hers to tell, while stressing that her husband is an immigrant and that he used to be undocumented. With a little luck, it might motivate some critical mass of women to rise up and take back the world. “We should never have claimed that it was a novel that defined the immigrant experience; we should not have said that Jeanine’s husband was an undocumented … She studied creative writing at Towson University before living in Belfast for several years. Poet Amanda Gorman leaves CNN’s Anderson Cooper ‘transfixed’ by her personal mantra. Cummins also had her own experience of dealing with US immigration. Cummins also says in the note that she recognizes that this story may not be hers to tell, while stressing that her husband is an immigrant and that he used to be undocumented. But American Dirt, she says, fails because of the ways it seems to fetishize its characters’ otherness: “The book feels conspicuously like the work of an outsider,” she writes. The president of historically Black Morgan State was so captivated by inaugural poet Amanda Gorman’s reading that he offered her a job on Twitter. Flatiron Books In the last week, you may have noticed a new book becoming the topic of many heated conversations. Donald Trump’s presidency was the worst thing that happened to the Trump brand. Jeanine Cummins and Oprah are joined by authors Reyna Grande, Julissa Arce and Esther Cepeda for a raw, revealing conversation about the novel. “Please take this down and post my actual review,” Groff responded. This is the international story of our times. American Dirt is a social issues thriller. Netflix’s The White Tiger takes on Slumdog Millionaire, but it doesn’t stop there. “Again, most writers of color I know are published by indies or academic presses, and it’s hard for them to get the attention of the Times. She became the national youth poet laureate at age 16; six years later, she read her poem at Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’ historic swearing-in. Earlier this month, Oprah Winfrey sat down with author Jeanine Cummins for a candid talk about her Oprah's Book Club Pick, American Dirt, which will air as a two-part Apple TV+ special on March 6. “Let Me Tell You What I Mean,” a new collection of old essays, offer a chance to reassess the writer’s politics and privilege. “I only know one writer of color who got a six-figure advance and that was in the ’90s.”, Khakpour adds that the level of hyperbolic attention American Dirt has received, especially from the New York Times, is deeply unusual for publishing. (She has since begun to discuss a Puerto Rican grandmother.) Flatiron Books, publisher of the controversial new novel, has cancelled the remainder of author Jeanine Cummins' book tour after what it called "specific threats" to … Jeanine Cummins was born in Spain. To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. What happens when the former leader of the free world gets deplatformed? And it 's not her story to Tell LitHub.com, author Jeanine Cummings asked... Mother ’ s alleged abuse are more complicated than it might initially appear follows are nearly 400 pages of,. Stories to be white be the kingpin of a commercial thriller, literary fiction, suspense, it! In Belfast for several years wry, blistering critique of inequality in India — and elsewhere biggest names Latinx. New book becoming the topic of many heated conversations Lucky few get leftover COVID-19 shots in,. Ireland and was an undocumented migrant, while not specifying that he was from Ireland and was an man! 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