Writing alum Kristen Martin '16 has published a debut nonfiction book, The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow (Bold Type Books, 2025). The book, whose title plays on the famous song from the iconic movie Annie, topples myths about orphanages in the U.S. Asked in an interview with BOMB Magazine if she identified with the term ‘orphan’ after she lost both her parents by the time she was 14-years-old, Martin spurned the label, saying it “felt like an erasure of my parents…it felt like being seen as an orphan would sever me from them.”
Overarchingly, the book tackles the term “orphan” itself, how it’s portrayed, un-dramatized and un-romanticized, versus what it really is off-screen. Martin deconstructs popular portrayals of orphaned children, including Annie, Oliver Twist, and the Boxcar Children; even Boy Meets World and The OC. There is a mythology around orphanhood, Martin is asserting. Parents dying when a child is too young to remember them, an orphan first landing with cruel caretakers before a journey of discovery and adventure lands them with new, virtuous caretakers making them whole, healed—it’s all an inaccurate portrayal of what it means, truly, to be an orphan. The popular portrayal strips the reality, turns it into “the propaganda being spread” by mainstream narratives, Martin said in an interview with Heather Radke for The Baffler.
Archival research along with memoir and cultural critique—certainly drawing upon Martin's experience as a book reviewer—constructs the crime, articulated in the epigraph by Gore Vidal: in the U.S., “We learn nothing because we remember nothing.”
About Martin’s research, The Washington Post wrote that "the history is sweeping, damning and infuriating, and requires the depth and care that Martin deploys to understand it fully...[contributing] to a cultural understanding in which orphanhood is neither manufactured, nor idealized, nor divorced from its dark history.” Nonfiction Professor Leslie Jamison calls the book "a deeply compassionate, rigorously researched, and passionately argued exploration of the gap between the myths and realities of American orphanhood [that] left me outraged, enlightened, and full of deepened conviction that we need to keep peeling away our collective American mythologies in order to reckon with our hardest truths."
Kristen Martin is a writer and critic based in Philadelphia. Her work has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New Republic, NPR, and elsewhere. She received an MFA in Nonfiction writing from Columbia University. The Sun Won't Come Out Tomorrow is her first book.
