Author appearance
Junot Díaz. 7 p.m. Sept. 21. $29 single, $39 couple; includes signed copy of book. Carter Center Day Chapel, 441 Freedom Parkway, Atlanta. 404-865-7100. www.cartercenter.org. Tickets available at www.acappellabooks.com or A Cappella Books, 208 Haralson Ave., Atlanta. 404-681-5128. Tickets sold at door night of event if available.
“The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” is the sweeping tale of an overweight Dominican immigrant whose quest for love is thwarted by a family curse that dates back to dictator Rafael Trujillo’s reign of terror over the Caribbean island during the first half of the 20th century. It won Junot Díaz, a creative writing professor at MIT, the Pulitzer Prize in 2008. His latest book, the short story cycle “This is How You Lose Her,” reprises “Oscar Wao” narrator Yunior, a womanizer who is devastated when his fiancée dumps him after she discovers his infidelities – all 50 of them.
Díaz reads and signs copies of “This is How You Lose Her” at the Carter Center Friday.
Q. You share a lot of similarities with Yunior – the immigrant experience, the death of a brother, a career in academia. How is he different from you?
A. I dress him in my clothes. I give him my curriculum vitae. I put him in the same apartments. But he is a different person. As my friends say: 'He's smarter than you. He's hotter than you. And he's cooler than you.' Me and Yunior have different paths in life.
Q. Yunior and Oscar seem to be two sides to the same coin – one is a virgin and the other is a player, but they’re both obsessed with sex.
A. I think what Oscar wants is love and intimacy. What Yunior clearly longs for is intimacy; what he allows himself and what his small Grinch heart permits is sex. That's what's kind of kooky about Yunior. He wouldn't be so tormented if all he wanted to do was [have sex].
Q. Yunior seems to see women solely as a means to an end.
A. One of the things you are palpably reminded of as a reader is that we have so little exposure to unsanitized male subjectivity in literature. Yunior suffers from what the majority of men suffer from: They don't fully imagine women as completely human. These guys will marry women. They will have children with women. But if you cracked open their hearts, their souls, their minds, you would find they have not fully franchised women as human beings. Somewhere in that dim soul of his, Yunior recognizes the humanity of women, but he fights it.
Q. Characters in your books often comment that infidelity is a mark of the Dominican male, but isn’t it universal?
A. I'm just using local weather conditions to talk about planetary climate. Dominican masculinity is just my in to talk about all masculinity. If I chose to say all Swedes are unfaithful, the women in Sweden would say, "Oh, yeah!" Infidelity is a fundamental part of masculinity. It is way more tolerated in the United States, but I have women tell me they don't like to read me because they don't want to think about it. That's why I feel like it's so hard to hear this because if you hear it, you have to ask really hard questions about yourself and about men. Infidelity is a feminist issue, and Dominican grassroots feminism is more advanced because they recognize it. What they're saying is if you want it to change, it cannot be ducked.
Q. Do you think it’s possible to change it?
A. Listen, it used to be absolutely normal behavior for a white man in the South to rape women of color. For hundreds of years that has been a normal franchise and that has completely changed. So I'm a huge believer in our ability to transform practices and people's imaginations. But it doesn't begin by avoiding the topic. It begins by that painful recognition.
Q. In the middle of the book is a heartbreaking piece called “Otravida, Otravez” that is the only story told from a woman’s point of view.
A. That's the story of the other woman that Yunior's father almost ran off with in the book. The hardest person for a kid to imagine sympathetically is the other woman. What we see here is Yunior, who we know is a writer, humanizing the other woman. This is akin to him coming to understand all the women in his life. There's nothing like having a fearful paradigm like the other woman when you're growing up to disfigure your vision of all women.
Q. So is there hope for Yunior?
A. That's the question the book asks the reader. My answer is the book. Do we believe that people who are [messed] up can regenerate themselves? That is the question. Is it possible to begin again?
About the Author
