'The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao' by Junot Díaz
So I'm late to the party, but I was given the incredible birthday gift of Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in June, and I've just finished it. Clearly, icajoleu knows me very well and this is seriously one of my favorite gift books ever. It's breathtaking and marvelous, and for the first time in a long time, I can say this is a novel that spoke to me. It's like dude wrote this book for me. No, I didn't get all the comic, manga, anime & RPG references, nor did I understand every bit of the Spanish and ghetto slang, but I luxuriated in all the Tolkien, the Star Wars, the Star Trek and the Dune. I loved all the Dominican history, the Trujillo oppression, the fukú, and the messy fucked-up family relationships - and also the love and devotion and optimism. The insane stubborn persistence, no matter the consequences (like mother, like son?). I haven't been this wowed by a book in ages.
I started hunting down Junot Díaz interviews. I love a lot of what he has to say, about ethnicity, writing as a person of color, science-fiction & fantasy and some of what it means in his work, but of course I gravitated toward a lot of what he says about writing. The following are a couple that stood out for me, esp. the first considering how long it takes me to write/rewrite (rinse, repeat x infinity, it seems) these days.
Slate: You once said that "you build your entire work on a series of failures." Can you talk a little bit about what you meant?
Díaz: I've never had the good fortune of getting a clear idea in my head and then writing the damn thing down in one go. The only success I've had as a writer is by screwing up over and over and over. I'll write a story or a chapter 20 times before I start approaching what I think the story should be. And it is in that process of writing what I'm not supposed to be writing that I find my way to what I am supposed to be writing.
This is a tiring and demoralizing way to go about writing. But I don't know any other approach. One of the reasons I guess I take so long to write. Not only is the process hard but it takes a lot to get back to the computer, when I know that chances are good that I'm only going to screw up again.
From a slicemagazine.org interview:Did you have a writing mentor? If so, how have they influenced you and what is the best advice they ever passed along?
So many people have helped me. But one of the most important: the writer David Mura. During my long midnight struggle with my novel he told me: In order to write the book you want to write in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book. It was a hard lesson for me to understand and ultimately to practice. For my novel I had to become a more compassionate person. Who wants to go through that fucking process? I just wanted to write. And yet until I achieved that condition there just was no finishing the novel, no matter how hard I tried.
I especially like this piece: Becoming a Writer
It wasn't that I couldn't write. I wrote every day. I actually worked really hard at writing. At my desk by 7 A.M., would work a full eight and more. Scribbled at the dinner table, in bed, on the toilet, on the No. 6 train, at Shea Stadium. I did everything I could. But none of it worked. My novel, which I had started with such hope shortly after publishing my first book of stories, wouldn't budge past the 75-page mark. Nothing I wrote past page 75 made any kind of sense. Nothing. Which would have been fine if the first 75 pages hadn't been pretty damn cool. But they were cool, showed a lot of promise. Would also have been fine if I could have just jumped to something else. But I couldn't. All the other novels I tried sucked worse than the stalled one, and even more disturbing, I seemed to have lost the ability to write short stories. It was like I had somehow slipped into a No-Writing Twilight Zone and I couldn't find an exit. Like I'd been chained to the sinking ship of those 75 pages and there was no key and no patching the hole in the hull. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote, but nothing I produced was worth a damn.
Want to talk about stubborn? I kept at it for five straight years. Five damn years. Every day failing for five years? I'm a pretty stubborn, pretty hard-hearted character, but those five years of fail did a number on my psyche. On me. Five years, 60 months? It just about wiped me out. By the end of that fifth year, perhaps in an attempt to save myself, to escape my despair, I started becoming convinced that I had written all I had to write, that I was a minor league Ralph Ellison, a Pop Warner Edward Rivera, that maybe it was time, for the sake of my mental health, for me to move on to another profession, and if the inspiration struck again some time in the future…well, great. But I knew I couldn't go on much more the way I was going. I just couldn't. I was living with my fiancée at the time (over now, another terrible story) and was so depressed and self-loathing I could barely function. I finally broached the topic with her of, maybe, you know, doing something else. My fiancée was so desperate to see me happy (and perhaps more than a little convinced by my fear that maybe the thread had run out on my talent) that she told me to make a list of what else I could do besides writing. I'm not a list person like she was, but I wrote one. It took a month to pencil down three things. (I really don't have many other skills.) I stared at that list for about another month. Waiting, hoping, praying for the book, for my writing, for my talent to catch fire. A last-second reprieve. But nada. So I put the manuscript away. All the hundreds of failed pages, boxed and hidden in a closet. I think I cried as I did it. Five years of my life and the dream that I had of myself, all down the tubes because I couldn't pull off something other people seemed to pull off with relative ease: a novel. By then I wasn't even interested in a Great American Novel. I would have been elated with the eminently forgettable NJ novel.
So I became a normal. A square. I didn't go to bookstores or read the Sunday book section of the Times . I stopped hanging out with my writer friends. The bouts of rage and despair, the fights with my fiancée ended. I slipped into my new morose half-life. Started preparing for my next stage, back to school in September. (I won't even tell you what I was thinking of doing, too embarrassing.) While I waited for September to come around, I spent long hours in my writing room, sprawled on the floor, with the list on my chest, waiting for the promise of those words to leak through the paper into me.
Maybe I would have gone through with it. Hard to know. But if the world is what it is so are our hearts. One night in August, unable to sleep, sickened that I was giving up, but even more frightened by the thought of having to return to the writing, I dug out the manuscript. I figured if I could find one good thing in the pages I would go back to it. Just one good thing. Like flipping a coin, I'd let the pages decide. Spent the whole night reading everything I had written, and guess what? It was still terrible. In fact with the new distance the lameness was even worse than I'd thought. That's when I should have put everything in the box. When I should have turned my back and trudged into my new life. I didn't have the heart to go on. But I guess I did. While my fiancée slept, I separated the 75 pages that were worthy from the mountain of loss, sat at my desk, and despite every part of me shrieking no no no no, I jumped back down the rabbit hole again. There were no sudden miracles. It took two more years of heartbreak, of being utterly, dismayingly lost before the novel I had dreamed about for all those years finally started revealing itself. And another three years after that before I could look up from my desk and say the word I'd wanted to say for more than a decade: done.
That's my tale in a nutshell. Not the tale of how I came to write my novel but rather of how I became a writer. Because, in truth, I didn't become a writer the first time I put pen to paper or when I finished my first book (easy) or my second one (hard). You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway. Wasn't until that night when I was faced with all those lousy pages that I realized, really realized, what it was exactly that I am.
http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Junot-Diaz-Talks-About-What-Made-Him-Become-a-Writer/print/1
I'm reading Nam Le's The Boat at the moment, but Junot Díaz's 1996 short story collection Drown is next on my list. Can't wait!
Fresh Air interview, 2007: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90111248
NYT from 1996: http://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/15/nyregion/more-orchard-beach-than-elaine-s.html?ref=junot_diaz
Powells interview, 2007: http://www.powells.com/blog/?p=14173
Slate interview, 2007: http://www.slate.com/id/2177644/
September 2007: http://www.bookslut.com/features/2007_09_011634.php (I esp. like what he says about the epigraph. And dude - he makes me feel like less of a loser when he says that it took him 7 years to finish one 20 page story.)
Short NY Mag article, 2007: http://nymag.com/guides/fallpreview/2007/books/36501/
Interview, November 2007: http://www.riehlife.com/2007/11/01/junot-diaz-author-the-brief-wondrous-life-of-oscar-wao-is-fresh-fun-and-frank/
Slate interview, april 2008: http://www.slate.com/toolbar.aspx?action=print&id=2188494
interviewed on the Colbert Report: http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/174353/june-18-2008/junot-diaz
JD on literature, 2008: http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/literature-opens-the-door-to-compassion-in-our-brief-lives/2008/05/25/1211653841093.html
CBC interview, 2008: http://www.cbc.ca/arts/books/story/2008/11/12/f-junot-diaz-oscar-wao.html
interview, February 2009: http://www.america.gov/st/peopleplace-english/2009/February/20090213134540mlenuhret0.2832453.html
JD interview, april 2009: http://www.newsarama.com/comics/040907-Junot-Diaz.html
Christchurch City Libraries interview: http://christchurchcitylibraries.com/Literature/People/D/DiazJunot/
Excerpt of a slicemagazine.org interview: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:hex52gGXGwAJ:www.slicemagazine.org/issue1.php+slicemagazine.org&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
Some miscellania:
JD teaches at MIT, so here's an MIT blog post by one of his students with links & commentary: http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/pulse/faculty_at_mit/running_away_with_the_field.shtml
While looking for Junot Díaz stuff, I came across this very interesting post about race & ethnicity in literature. Both JD & Neil Gaiman are mentioned (Gaiman in the comments re: Anansi Boys). Obviously the idea of race/ethnicity in literature is one with which I am connected and it's something I think about a lot.
How To Read and Respond to Literature of Color
NYT 1999 Junot Díaz op-ed with Danticat on illegal deportation of Haitians in the Dominican Republic: http://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/20/opinion/the-dominican-republic-s-war-on-haitian-workers.html
Annotated Oscar Wao