prologue
Q&A
HUFFINGTON
09.23.12
— the novel for which Diaz won the Pulitzer — Yunior takes
a backseat to tell the life of Oscar, a science fiction-obsessed
would-be writer trying to unearth his family’s history and get
laid. Returning to the short story in his new collection, This
Is How You Lose Her, Diaz turns his focus on Yunior, excavating the narrator’s early adulthood relationships, littered with
loss and love. Yunior’s story gives voice to Diaz’s explorations
of his own youth — as he puts it, those years are “the well I
always seem to draw from.” —Nicholas Miriello
IF CONRAD HAS
THE RIVER IN THE
CONGO, I HAVE MY
TEENAGE YEARS
IN LONDON TERRACE,
WRESTLING FIRST
WITH MY BROTHER’S
CRAZINESS
AND THEN WITH
HIS CANCER.
David Long has said, “Novels are
mostly middle; stories are all beginnings and endings.” Do you agree with
his analysis? Any answer about
forms so diverse will always be
necessarily incomplete. Whatever I say about the novel or the
short story is more about my
own aesthetic than it is about
novels or short stories per se.
With that said: My sense has
always been that the novel traditionally is better at conjuring
a world than a short story. Part
of what gives many of the novels I’ve read their immense
power is the way they are able to immerse readers into the
world of its characters. Not only the time-space, the characters, but the worldview, the sensibility, the historical and
material and social moment. In the novels I’m most familiar
with, a reader literally leaves their world behind in order to
inhabit this new world which the writer has drawn up. There
is something demiurgic about novel-writing. Stories can
do worlds well too — one only has to recall Octavia Butler’s