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In person, Junot Diaz comes across the same way he does in his writing: Friendly, witty, regularly profane and now and then profound. About 30 people turned out at Borders Preston/Royal to hear him earlier this evening. He chatted amicably before doing a short reading from "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," followed by questions and a second, shorter reading. "It's sort of like a shrinking experience, artists and folks just getting together and talking," he said, before offering a potential marketing slogan to draw bigger crowds to author signings in this corporate-sponsored era: "Even if the guy's gonna talk nonsense, it's gotta be better than three commercials, right?" He chatted about the weather and war -- and how rare it was to see signs of it anywhere on his book tour. He was quizzed about everything from the 11-year gap between his published books (he drew inspiration from a Hong Kong action movie "Hard Boiled," where a cop's mentor tells him: "'You can't lose forever.' I know it sounds really screwed up, but that propelled me through my darkest period") to baseball to the need for young writers to have mentors. "There's an honesty in sports that I think sometimes in arts gets missed. My friends, when they physically think they can't do something, their coach will yell at them until they do it. They'll be pushed. And as artists we often forget that in our most difficult moments, often you have to be pushed through. And almost every athlete knows that. It's why coaches are so important. "So I found that with my art, if I didn't have someone there who was willing to put their s--- on the line and say, 'Dumba--, you can do this, you can do this, you can do this,' I probably wouldn't have pushed myself through some of these areas." After the reading, he answered a couple of questions that have come up on the blog. First, I asked whether, in those long years between books, he felt he had lived under the same "fukú," or curse, that his characters deal with. "That's such a great question," he said. "If I was more interesting, I would have thought that. But I'm one of those people who has no ... I would never think that there's any supernatural agency interested in me, good or bad. I'm telling you, I'm the dude in the crowd scene in the Cecil B. DeMille movies. I'm not the one who gets singled out. I just thought I sucked as a writer." He talked about the persistence it took to get through those years. I said that most people would have given up. "I did," he replied. "But you come back." Some days, he would produce only a few paragraphs or pages at a time. "It's like you're chipping through a mountain. You wonder whether you're just going to be trapped here your whole life, whether your little tool is going to break, whether you're actually curling back into the heart of the mountain. And you just keep digging and digging and digging, and one day there's suddenly a chip -- and light. That's exactly what it feels like. But if you give up, you're dead." Finally, I asked him about his own nerd roots, which is a big part of the book's appeal to me. He talked about how that divide played out in two main characters in the book -- one a smooth, popular player, the other a morbidly obese dork. "If nerd had a density, I was white dwarf," he said. "Until I discovered girls. And then I betrayed the whole thing. I mean, the whole relationship between Junior and Oscar that plays out is my own internal psychological treachery. I mean, I betrayed my nerdy self to be cool and interesting and to get girls. For many, many years, I thought about the kid I used to be. And part of the book was sort of a tribute to that kid." Did he grow up and integrate these two halves of himself? "I wish they were integrated. But that would hide what I really did. The same way that Junior no matter how hard he writes, he'll never bring Oscar back. I feel like I'll never bring that kid back. I'm like a huge science fiction fan again. This novel brought me back to it. But I know there's a part of me that would have been quite different had I been brave enough to stand up for what I cared about and not just thrown it all to the wind." He did acknowledge, though, that "Taran Wanderer" and "The High King" were "the most important books of my life" as a youth. That made two of us. And I'm looking forward to where his own writerly wanderings take him next. |
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Posted by Celia Johnson @ 9:39 AM Sun, Sep 23, 2007
Check out an exclusive interview with Junot Diaz about his life before becoming a successful writer in Slice, a new literary magazine, which is available now. www.slicemagazine.org