“This Is How You Lose Her” is a catalog of wrecked love affairs, multilingual violence, unsatisfying labor and stranded children. It’s like trying to distill the ocean down to a glass of water. This receptivity to all the possible sources of inspiration is what makes Díaz’s work both so distinctively rich and, it seems to me, so difficult for him to write. His work is defined by this kind of radical inclusiveness - the language of drug dealers and Tolkien dorks the problems of destitute Dominican women and their more privileged American sons. There were notebooks from the writing of “Oscar Wao,” filled with very tall handwriting leaning hard to the right.Īs Díaz pulled out one document after another, I got the sense that, if only he could have carried a big-enough folder - maybe one the size of a couple of continents - he would have packed in just about everything he has ever seen or heard or (especially) read: libraries of fan fiction, rusty knives, third-world crowds, petroglyphs, secret police. There were folded-up pieces of scrap paper from his back pocket that he had used to capture ideas as he walked down the street. There were newspaper clippings about the “dirty war” in Argentina, a subject that has haunted Díaz since childhood. There was a photo of his parents posing proudly next to a cow. There was a small black-and-white photo of his father in a fascist uniform, the discovery of which, Díaz said, inspired “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” There was a bleak photo of the New Jersey steel mill at which Díaz worked during college, a job about which he has tried, but failed, many times to write. This turned out to contain a wide variety of documents. Díaz arrived walking stiffly - he had major back surgery just a few weeks before - and carrying a fat folder of material pinned under one arm. In hopes of peeking into his artistic boiler room, I asked Díaz if he would mind bringing along to our interview a few artifacts of writerly inspiration - a lucky pencil, maybe, or some druid crystals - whatever he keeps handy to defeat all the little hobgoblins that try to drive him crazy every time he sits down to write. His fuel just sits there, and sits there, and maybe every once in a while gives off a tiny ribbon of damp smoke, until you start to worry that it all got rained on and ruined - and then, 5 or 10 years later, it suddenly explodes into one of the most mesmerizing fires anyone can remember.ĭíaz’s new story collection, “This Is How You Lose Her,” is his first book in five years and only his third book over all. Junot Díaz’s metabolism is notoriously slow. Every writer is cursed or blessed with a unique creative metabolism: the distinctive speed and efficiency with which he or she converts the raw fuel of life into the mystical, dancing blue smoke of art.
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