prologue
Q&A
HUFFINGTON
09.23.12
that the novel can, the short story can far more convincingly
remind the reader of life’s cruel brevity and of how irrevocable some of the shit we decide and that happens to us can be.
In your experience, how do you negotiate the demands of writing in
these different structures? For me, novel-writing is all about
coping with the form’s utter imperfectability. Short-storywriting, on the other hand, is all about coping with the
form’s vexing perfectibility.
In This Is How You Lose Her we follow the character Yunior in fragments, constantly returning to his familial relationships and the
close quarters of London Terrace. What about Yunior, Rafa and New
Jersey keep you coming back? Stories about less-than-brotherly brothers are one of those timeless formulas in our
culture which, for some of us, have unlimited appeal. But
more to the point, 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. It’s
my foundational narrative chronotope, the well I always
seem to draw from. In this moment where, for better or
worse, a huge part of who I would become was made. I still
don’t really understand all that happened in those years,
and I think part of my compulsive returning to that time is
the predictable desire to comprehend. As an artist, if your
internal space asks you to draw boats, you draw boats
— nothing you can do once that call arrives. With me, I
find myself called upon again and again to return to those
years and [there’s] really nothing I can do about it.
John Updike once said, “I have written in the first person. In the end it
becomes a kind of trap, one wouldn’t want to call the masterpieces of
first-person fiction monologues, but there is that danger always of never
getting outside that one voice and that one head.” As someone who uses
the first person masterfully, do you sense that “danger” when writing so
closely to one voice and, in the case of Yunior, with one character for a