In his debut novel, Victim (Doubleday Books, 2024), Andrew Boryga explores identity politics, diversity with a capital D, and how social media has weaponized both movements. As a writer interested in how victims become perpetrators and perpetrators victims, I was excited to dive into a book about a Hispanic kid from the Bronx, Javier “Javi” Perez, who utilizes his POC status to hustle his way into the literary world.
Victim starts Javi’s journey as a kid living with his mom in the Bronx. After a white guidance counselor encourages Javi to market his circumstances to colleges, he embellishes his admissions essay about his difficult upbringing. After arriving at Donlon, a prestigious college upstate, Javi begins to learn the language of the well-educated and uses terms such as “hegemony,” “supremacy,” and “racist” to corner his opponents and persuade them to let him write columns about false hardships he experiences. On one hand, Javi is writing what the people want to hear: an impoverished kid experiences hardship after hardship, yet triumphs. However, the trauma porn he spits out is far from the truth. After college, he grows his career as a freelance writer in New York, and the lies spiral out of control. The only person aware of the depth of his lies is Gio, his childhood friend recently released from prison.
Boryga’s previous work includes essays about daily life and education in both New York City and Miami. Over Zoom, we discuss virtue signaling, autofiction, and the lure of the victim narrative.
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The Rumpus: Much of this novel discusses how virtue signaling is used in modern culture, especially from well-educated young people. What did the research for this book look like, and how much of it was inspired by real life events?
Andrew Boryga: A lot of it was inspired by real life events. I can’t say I did hard research necessarily for it. The book evolved over ten years, so it was a really long process. When I first started out, I had Javi and Gio, the same two central characters, but it was more about their story growing up in the Bronx together, so it was all set as young adults in the Bronx. It was over time that all these other layers started to be added on, and I think that was because I was also moving through these layers.
I started this book when I was a freshman at Cornell. I had come there from the Bronx, which is a very different background. Being at Cornell felt like an alien world to me, even though it was only four hours away. There were themes about navigating this elitist space and hearing from people who seemed to say the right things, but then seeing how they actually moved, I was like “I grew up in the Bronx—I grew up around a lot of people conning you and playing you,” so I knew how to read some of that stuff. They were acting a little funny. There was stuff I was kind of picking up on, and a lot of it continued to build.
I also had the kind of weird, crazy experience of working at the New York Times at eighteen as an intern. I had won this scholarship for underprivileged students, and I kept going back every year. So it was like moving through Cornell elitism and then New York Times newsroom elitism and seeing all these ways where there was this emphasis on championing diversity, but seeing it actually play out in real life was different than the words they were speaking. I think that started to work in me, and I became interested in writing about it after a while. I was trying to find the right way to go about it, and that took another five, six years to figure out.
Rumpus: So you started writing this book about ten years ago. Can you go more into detail about how the editing process worked and what got left on the cutting room floor?
Boryga: A lot. In the beginning, the book was really about—and it’s still a theme but maybe not the biggest one—survivor’s guilt of coming out of the neighborhood and my background and finding myself in this safe, cozy place. Cornell is a lovely, idyllic place. They have great food, and I had a full tuition scholarship, and everything was great. But then I would go home, and it would be contrasted with friends I grew up with being in jail or having drug problems and you know, seeing all types of stuff and different avenues I could have taken. And that fucked with my head, like “Why did I make it out and not these people?” We grew up together, we’re not that different. So I think a lot of the book started as a way to figure that out or write about that idea, and there was that version of the book for a while until 2015 or 2016.
I had worked in media for a while, freelanced for a bunch of places, worked with the New York Times, and I started to see how during that period, there was a lot of interest in me as a writer but only if I told certain stories about my “tragic background and upbringing.” Those stories were instantly snapped up. Or I’d pitch something, and it’d be rerouted toward, “Well, why don’t you add some of your personal background?” At the time, I was naive, and I just wanted those clips and bylines. I was just trying to make it in this business. But after a while, I started to get jaded. There was all this talk after Trump was elected about diverse voices and they did want diverse voices, but they also wanted a certain story. I think there are genuinely people who want to uplift voices of color, and there still are, but I got the sense that they wanted you if you told them the story they wanted to hear. I tried to play with that.
The first version was Gio and Javi as young adults, and then another version, where Gio was the center—I had so much fun with Gio. Readers of mine would always say, “Javi is so passive, you need to make him more like Gio.” So then I thought what if Gio is the guy? There’s a version where Gio gets out of jail and becomes this artist-muralist. I was interested in the fact that I grew up doing graffiti and it was super criminalized. Now it’s like there’s a mural there so we can charge you thirty bucks for coffee. I thought what the fuck is that. So maybe Gio gets out of jail and he knows this thing is cool and pimps it as his own hobby. So I wrote a version around that, but it stalled out. Then I started to look back at Javi and see how I was stifling him because I had based him off me, and I was afraid of people thinking I was bad. I was going through this stuff in the media and thinking, “Well, what if somebody wasn’t like me and leaned into this shit. What if they saw this happening and were hip to it?” For me, I started backing away, but what if there was somebody who ran right into it? At the time, there was Jussie Smollett and people making shit up just to get attention. People like Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass—I was thinking about them and what if there was this Puerto Rican Bronx guy who sees the game and leans into it and takes it where it goes. It was this exciting idea that felt fresh and fun and different from a lot of the books I was reading at the time—different from a lot of the other books I was reading at the time, like it was so hard, and I made it out and I was so oppressed. Some were great and some were heavy-handed.
I was also yearning for a book where the main protagonist was a person of color but was allowed to be bad, to not be sympathetic. A lot of these books were clear from the beginning: this was the good guy, and these were the bad guys. It was so boring to me! And this felt like a way to write a different version and get at some ideas I didn’t necessarily know the answers to but that I felt like I needed to talk about. Because—this is weird—why are we pretending that these big conglomerates care? It’s just a trend, we all know it. I kind of wanted to get at that. That was the evolution. It slowly evolved to there, and when I reached that point, I realized that was it and had the kind of sustenance I was looking for all along.
Rumpus: What was it like to write a fictional protagonist who shared some gnarly elements of yourself?
Boryga: It was fun once I finally embraced it. I had this moment around 2020: my son was born, and that was a big deal, becoming a father. I used to be so invested in the literary world and trying to get in and being an acclaimed author and making sure I’m followed by the right people and all this bullshit and Twitter. And then I had a kid and I was like “I don’t have time for that. I barely have time to write. I’m just going to write what I want to write.”
I divorced myself from any expectation or stake in the character I have. I know he’s not me. And the more I can lean into him and make him not like me but push him to the limits, that felt fun. I figured they’re going to think it’s me. Writers of color always get that question and a lot of them make this big deal of “Why don’t you ask white writers that?” But when I read a novel and the character is kind of like the author, I assume that shit too.
They’re going to think it’s me and I’m going in with that assumption and writing what I want to write anyway. I know it’s not me, so whatever. When I came to that decision, everything became really fun, because I could pull out the gnarly, ugly inclinations that I had but didn’t act on. And then what if this guy acted on that shit, though? It became this way to write this alter ego if I had been more cynical, if I had been more bloodthirsty to get to the top, I could have seen myself going down that path.
But I was lucky that I had good people around me, which is another aspect of the book I wanted to include: People who ground me. People who are far away from the literary establishment and the media. People who call me out and say, “Andrew, you acting funny,” which is why I never went that deep like Javi did, but it was fun imagining that type of person. It was fun once I accepted it. People will think whatever they think. It’s out of my hands anyway. The book is in the world.
Rumpus: Ricardo, Anais, and Javi all represent these different intersections of the POC experience. When did you bring these characters in, and did you always have the triangular idea in mind?
Boryga: Anais and Ricardo came in a little later once I had hit on the idea that Javi was going to be this cynical, lean-in diversity conman. Once I decided on that, I wrote more on my college experience. In college, you’re thrust into this space that’s mostly white and whether you actually come from a really wealthy family or the hood, you’re just POC to everybody. So you’re suddenly lumped together but when you actually hang out, you realize there are a lot of differences. People like Ricardo who seize the moment, think this is my time to “be MLK,” when back home, he was just Ricardo the suburban kid who played lacrosse. You can suddenly lean into these radical ideas on a college campus.
It was fun to tease that out and get at the nuance to the larger audience. In a lot of ways, people see POC as that same microcosm as we have it in college. You’re all Latinos. You’re all Black people. We all think alike and it’s the POC way of thinking, but there are so many nuances depending on where you come from, your religious background, family structure, all types of stuff. I wanted to show the various levels of individuality within this small Latino microcosm on campus. Even among them, they’re very different people and don’t necessarily relate to each other in all the ways an outside audience might imagine. In these hyperwhite spaces, you’re figuring out how to game the system in various ways and they’re all figuring this out and it was fun to pit them against each other.
Rumpus: Some of the funniest portions of this book were at Donlon. How did you incorporate the humor, how much was exaggerated, how much was the mundane of going to school at a place like Cornell?
Boryga: I’ve always written with humor. I come from a background and culture where my family flames the shit out of me all the time. All my friends, we love each other, but we’re making fun of each other all the time. “Your hairline is way back there. You’re fat. What’s up with that mustache?” We just go after each other all the time, and to me that’s an expression of love because they’re so vulnerable and they’re telling you things that on some level are true—things nobody would say unless they love you but making it funny.
My family has done that too with our migration from Puerto Rico to the Bronx and Brooklyn. There’s a lot of trauma and we didn’t come from a wealthy background in Puerto Rico. They could tell the most tragic story in the world, and it’d be hilarious. It’s only tragic when you go home and you think, “Damn that’s really fucked up.” But the way they said it was really funny. I’ve always appreciated that delivery, and there’s something subversive about it I’ve always liked. When there’s humor tucked into it and it’s delivered in a way where you have to parse out what’s really there, it’s more challenging and more fulfilling.
Rumpus: From the start, we know the book is talking to somebody. And it’s confirmed in the end that the “you” is us, the reader and not anybody specific. Did you write this book with us as the Twitterverse readers in mind?
Boryga: The memoir structure came later, but I imagined this talking to the people who would have seen somebody go up in flames and get canceled and seeing that person come out with a tell-all a few years later. And the skepticism they would read it with, the way it would be picked apart because it’s like “Fuck that guy.” If Jussie Smollett wrote a tell-all about what happened, people would totally read it, but they wouldn’t take it at face level. They would find parts to highlight and bring up on the Internet, so I wrote it with that idea. What if this guy really had been going up in flames in this public way and was canceled and wrote something about it? How would that reader look at it? If he had enough understanding about how the media system worked, how would he preemptively write against that? It became a fun narrative vehicle to put everything in. I had tried to write this linear version, but a lot of the humor and commentary was lost as a result of that.
Rumpus: Given that he’s talking to the Twitterverse in this book and that’s the frame, what do you think that says about Javi’s redemption?
Boryga: What I like about the ending is that you don’t necessarily know what he’s after. He’s not really, in my mind, after redemption. He’s thinking, “This is my version, take it or leave it. I’m divorced from this.” But at the same time, knowing him, you’re thinking, “Is that really the case or are you trying to come back into the game?” There’s this ambiguity about it I really like. Does he have something to say? I like leaving it open-ended for the reader to figure out.
Rumpus: How did you handle writing so much about Twitter and reporting and interweaving that into the story?
Boryga: It felt natural because at the time I was a features reporter and a national features reporter for a local regional newspaper. I was very much on the inside seeing things. At the same time, there was a period right before my son was born when I was really addicted to Twitter and on it a lot, checking it all the time, and more than checking it but tying personal value to it, like how many followers I had, how many likes I got—I cared about these things in a way that was really unhealthy.
Then I had my son and pivoted to what was really important in my life, and I could step back and think, “What was going on there?” It was really me trying to make sense of all that and the discomfort I often felt in newsrooms when they would have me go after stories, particularly stories about injustice. A lot of it was like, “Get the juiciest injustice possible, the tears, the death, the despair.” It just felt weird that I was mining these people’s stories and making connections with them, and I was thinking, “Am I really helping?” There was a point when I thought I was doing more harm than good and that’s probably why I stepped away from being a daily reporter. I didn’t know if I was really changing things or helping things. It was this weird cycle that I didn’t know how to get out of. This whole business, the way that the industry has changed and the funding mechanisms, they rely on social media to survive.
Rumpus: How do you think identity politics has shaped contemporary literature?
Boryga: If you’re a writer of color—am I going to write about my weird obsession about some dress or mine my family’s immigrant past? We all know that it’s this weird ecosystem marketplace where you need some kind of strife in there. So it’s a weird place, but I do think it’s changing. There is more yearning for nuanced voices. I want to see a novel with POC characters but that’s the least interesting part of the book. The book doesn’t need to tell me your POC experience. Just write a great book that happens to inhabit this world. There has been stuff in the past that has done that, and there’s more coming out that does that. I’m hopeful that the waters are shifting a bit.
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Author photograph by David Gonzalez
