The first time I read Junot Díaz, I was in my mid-20s and working as a bookseller. The proof copy of his second book, The Brief And Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao (I still own that copy) had a bold cover – yellow, red and blue – and the words within it were even more vivid: “She was the kind of girlfriend God gives you young, so you’ll know loss the rest of your life,” Díaz writes.
“Who is this man?” I asked my sister as I pressed the book into her hands.
Here’s what I know about Díaz: he’s Dominican American. He’s funny. He won the Pulitzer prize for Oscar Wao. He received the MacArthur “Genius” grant in 2012. He is dazzlingly intelligent. In his three books, short stories and many essays, he writes with a searing honesty that feels precious among male writers of similar stature. It’s an honesty rooted in real life, lit by the type of fire that burns clean. Here he is on a love in its death throes in This Is How You Lose Her: “Our relationship wasn’t the sun, the moon, and the stars, but it wasn’t bullshit either.”
But the realism does not make his work any less poetic. He describes a face with lyrical precision: “A mouth like unswept glass – when you least expect it she cuts you.” I discover something new with every reread; on the desert island, his books would be one of my luxury picks.
In a world that often pretends our experiences are the same, Díaz is unafraid to explore the discrepancies. He’s trying. “I’m like everybody else: weak, full of mistakes, but basically good,” he writes. Can’t say fairer than that.
