Writers’ ethnicity

If writers of a defined background can “become imprisoned” by it, this “cage of ethnicity” works both ways (“Exploring Typecast Writers,” by Scott Martelle, July 27). I agree that readers, reviewers, publishers and agents have become “constrained by their perceptions that the author’s vision is limited to a component culture.”

As a case in point, my recent novel, a story about an Amerasian teenager and her American half sister after the Vietnam War, sparked similar questions based on this lopsided thinking. How could an American novelist (with an Israeli background to boot) possibly write or even have the right to write a novel where a substantial percentage of the characters are Vietnamese? My answer: As readers, we are certainly not tethered by the happenstance of our cultural backgrounds.

As writers searching for the universality of the human experience, we should not be so constrained as well.

Leora Krygier

Encino