The United States of Amnesia
On releasing a book the day after Trump's second inauguration
While I was writing The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow: The Dark History of American Orphanhood, I’d whip out an index card whenever the threads of my research and reporting synthesized into an especially salient realization. I would jot down the idea on the card and pin it up behind my desk, where it served as a reminder of what I was intending to illuminate in the book.
Fairly early on, I had two epigrammatic quotes get stuck in my head like mantras—one from George Vidal and one from William Faulkner. I scribbled them down and pinned them up under a letterpress card from the Kelly Writers House, where I was lucky to launch my book this week:
Faulkner, who wrote over and over again about how history haunts Southerners, wrote this line in Requiem for a Nun, a work of fiction that combines prose and a script for a play. It’s been widely paraphrased, including by Barack Obama in a spring 2008 speech here in Philadelphia at the Constitution Center about the history of racism in America. When I wrote this down, I was thinking about how we live in the United States today with the deep and abiding consequences of all of our historic misdeeds—including toward vulnerable children.
It was the full Vidal quote, though, that I felt spoke most strongly to the themes of my book: “Happily, for the busy lunatics who rule over us, we are permanently the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing.”
This quote comes from Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia, which just so happened to be published by Nation Books, the precursor to Bold Type—my own imprint. Vidal put this collection together in the aftermath of George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection, and rails against our predatory and imperial war on terror and “the bank”—the military-industrial complex that has rendered America an oligarchy.
Le plus ça change, non? I mean, that’s the whole point. Vidal is eerily prescient, precisely because both the American public and political class have always failed to meaningfully reflect on its history—to do the work that Faulkner did in his fictions.
For me, though, “we learn nothing because we remember nothing” echoed again and again because it spoke to how we as a nation have learned little about protecting children and families over the past 200-plus years—we have been uninterested in facing reality and understanding our history, and have instead been content to continually retell the same optimistic fictions. It eventually became one of the two epigraphs that open my book (the other is from Little Orphan Annie, of course).
When my pub date was set months ago and I realized it was the day after the inauguration, I worried that the book would be swallowed whole by national news. After all, I pushed back against a November or December 2024 release (wise). But I didn’t allow myself to seriously confront the possibility that we’d be opening a second Trump era, or that my book’s title and the Vidal epigraph would be so on the nose.
Releasing my book last week as Trump flooded the zone with brutal executive orders (that curiously do nothing to address the price of groceries that so many of his voters claim to be their top priority) did at times feel like this meme:
But it also felt horribly apt—and further steeled my belief that it is crucially, existentially important that Americans start remembering and learning from our history, and fast. This is the intent behind The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow. Trump and his bootlickers in Congress and the oligarchs who prop him up are attempting to take us back to a time without civil rights protections and a robust regulatory state, back to a time when women’s freedoms and reproductive choices and were tightly curtailed, back to a time when we had no social safety net. I write about those times in my book. We can apply those lessons to our current fight.
My belief that I have written a book that in many ways meets our current moment has made me feel less ridiculous promoting it. So please bear with me as I share some highlights from pub week:
I am forever indebted to the brilliant Gretchen Sisson, author of Relinquished, for this perceptive, generous, rave (!) review of The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow in the Washington Post (gift link). (Also! Gretchen’s book was just shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction! Congratulations, Gretchen!!)
BookMarks chose Gretchen’s review as one of five you must read this week and my book was the best reviewed in nonfiction for the week!
I loved talking to fellow Bold Type author Jack Lowery about the book for BOMB Magazine, where I got my start writing book reviews!
LitHub ran an excerpt of what is perhaps my favorite chapter in the book.
I had a great conversation with Julia Lurie for Mother Jones about the book, and especially appreciated her introduction to the Q&A
Events! You can watch my convo on pub night with Jamie-Lee Josselyn at the Kelly Writers House here! There was a book cake! CSPAN BookTV recorded my event with Lily Meyer at Politics & Prose (will share when it’s avail)! Emma Eisenberg and I talked about Boy Meets World and The O.C. at Philly’s Barnes & Noble! I got to see so many friends and loved ones! And there’s still one more in Brooklyn on Wednesday 1/29!
Finally, these are going to be hard times for families and children in our country, and I want to highlight the nonprofits I write about in The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow as places to support:
Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, which provides free civil legal services to low-income Philadelphians, including around immigration and LGBTQ+ issues
JMAC for Families and RISE, which both support system-impacted parents in NYC and fight for policy change
upEND Movement, which is working to change narratives about the family-policing system and fight for an abolitionist future
ThinkOfUs, which is working to reduce unnecessary foster care placements and expand kinship care nationwide
Lawyers for Children, which provides legal representation for children in foster care in NYC