By Erica M. Lee and David Edward Clark

Junot Diaz. dirtypop.org

Junot Diaz has won a plethora of awards for his novel, The Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, including the Pulitzer Prize in 2008.  He speaks in Finney Chapel tonight at 8 p.m. as our next Convocation Speaker.

F+L:  Tell us a story about a lesson you learned in college.

Junot: God, that’s a good question.  You guys are fucking me up.  Again, I can’t speak for anyone else clearly, but I think one of the strange parts of my college experience was getting around the idea that I was the main character in the movie.  Like, I sort of assumed that I was the protagonist of every situation and every moment, when in reality, I was just a minor, non-speaking role in 90% of the story, which is a long way of saying that the biggest lesson to me was discovering how self-centered and narcissistic and blind I was to the larger community and the larger context that I lived in.  But that one’s sort of vague.

I guess the thing that I really learned was that there’s nothing like four years of college if you’re fucking paying attention to meet yourself.  And a lot of people, a lot of my friends–I don’t know about this generation, but a lot of my friends–went through their college, four years, or five, or six, and they never really met themselves, which is to say, they never really got a sense of what they were doing right, and what they were doing wrong.  I guess there’s nothing like fucking up a key class that you needed to graduate and finding yourself, like, “Oh shit, I’ve got to somehow cram in three credits or I won’t graduate in May” to begin to discover who you are.  I think that the lesson that I got out was this idea that if I finished school without meeting myself, it would have been a failed experience, no matter how good my grades were, or where I got into graduate school.

The best minor thing that I learned is never talk sex with any of your exes.  That’s a really bad idea.  That will haunt you the rest of your life.

F+L:  How do you write?

Junot: With great difficulty every morning around 7 a.m.

F+L:  What have been some of your most memorable writing experiences?

Junot: Well, I don’t have many memorable ones recently.  I think that for the last ten or eleven years, I’ve just had ones that I would like to forget.  I spent a long period writing a book that was very difficult; it didn’t bring me much joy.  One would think that when you finish an incredibly long hardship, like this novel was for me, that there would be this tremendous celebration, but it was the exact opposite.  I was so shell-shocked when I finished the book, thinking that I had given my life up for 400 pages of nonsense, that I didn’t even really get a chance to celebrate it.

I guess I remember, I remember sitting at a table in Brooklyn very early during Christmas holidays, back when I was in college.  I remember very early in the morning—this was before Brooklyn became Brooklyn–and I remember writing the first story that was going to be in Drown.  I wrote it in one sitting, sat there for 8 hours, wrote like 30 pages, and it was done.  It was such a remarkable experience, because it never, never duplicated itself.

I’ll never forget that Christmas Eve morning.  I think I realized then that I would never turn away from writing.

F+L:  Which story was it in Drown?

Junot: It was the final story in Drown, “Negocios,” which was the first one written.

F+L:  In what ways does your writing interact with other books, and how does it add to the literary conversation?

Junot: The second question: I don’t know.  I’m not qualified to say that.  I think my novel made a real show of how it connects with other books by talking about every damn book that had anything to do with the novel.  I think in Oscar Wao, there’s at least a hundred books referenced.  Sometimes when you read a book, if the only book that survived in the world was that book, you wouldn’t know if there were any other books, because the book never references another book.  You know?  The book seems to exist in a sphere where there are no other books.  On the other hand, there are books like Oscar Wao, where if that’s the only book that survives, you’ll at least know that this culture had two hundred other novels, and you might not have the books, but you’ll have all the records there.  I think some novels are deeply imbedded in that intertextuality, and others, the intertextuality is invisible.  I like to make it visible, because I wanted people to have an experience of, you know, if you were really, really, really nerdy, you could go and read some of the books that Oscar Wao read.

F+L: Explain your life as we stand on one foot.

Junot: As we stand?

F+L: Yeah, let’s go.  [David and Erica stand on one foot.]

Junot: Okay, ready?  Immigrant kid from New Jersey who absolutely adored reading and realized that he could never turn on his back on either New Jersey or Santo Domingo and generally gloomy and absolutely adores traveling.

F+L: Thank you!

Junot: That’s actually–that’s the best thing I’ve ever seen.