In the wake of last year’s contentious presidential election, the United States feels more divided than ever. Americans can’t seem to agree on anything, from controversial social issues to even the very .
The polarization is amplified by the social and political bubbles that surround many Americans, where they only interact with people and ideas they already agree with. These echo chambers are fueled by an array of factors, including that reinforce our biases and a fragmented media landscape of news sources with very different ideological slants and perspectives on reality.
How can a country divided against itself stand, or hope to understand itself in the absence of common ground? Instead of seeing the people outside of our bubbles filtered through polarizing narratives, how can we learn to understand their perspectives and hear them — in their own voices? As the discourse in America grows louder and more toxic, it seems more important than ever to listen to each other’s stories, and there are a slew of newer books that can help us do that.
“There will always be people who do not want to see both sides of an issue, and that’s true for people on either side,” says Diane Guerrero, an actor on Orange Is the New Black and Jane the Virgin, with whom we spoke when Audible produced her memoir . “But,” she adds, “I think that the stories of real people have an impact.”
Her own story is harrowing: Born in America to parents from Colombia, Guerrero came home from school one day to discover that immigration agents had arrested her parents for overstaying their visas. They were soon deported. With her family gone and no support from the government, she was left largely to fend for herself at age 14.
In the Country We Love details her struggles to build a new life and a successful acting career despite that devastating loss. While she wrote the book in hopes that it could help young people in similar situations feel less alone, she says it has also had an impact on people from very different backgrounds, in part because it humanizes the struggles of undocumented immigrants through a familiar voice.
“What we do see is people growing more concerned when the threat of deportation touches someone they know,” says Guerrero. “If people are willing to read my book because they have seen my work, then I hope they appreciate the complexity of issues like immigration from a different perspective. The more diversity of ideas people expose themselves to, whether in books, entertainment, or news, the better we are able to have real public conversations about how to move forward together.”
“I think the humor has allowed them to feel comfortable engaging on a topic they might otherwise not go out of their way to be part of.”
Jessica Bennett, the author of , notes that it can be a real challenge to get people to expose themselves to new points of view, especially when a book asks them to pay money to move outside their comfort zone. “In the same way people limit their news consumption to sources they want to hear about, I’m pretty sure they can do the same with books,” says Bennett.
