On tour: Meet the author Junot Diaz
US author Junot Diaz is visiting Australia in August for the Melbourne and Brisbane writers festivals. Diaz is the author of books including The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and most recently This is How You Lose Her (both Faber).
What would you put on a shelf-talker for your book?
This is a book about how a very particular sort of guy that none of us should be dating but many of us do (the dreaded male slut) is made and also broken.
What is the silliest question you’ve ever been asked on a book tour?
To be honest I’m just glad that anyone asks me any questions at all and that I have a book tour. You have to understand I’m a professor too, so ‘silly questions’ are the start of most teaching.
And the most profound?
Out of nowhere a young woman asked: ‘Did she forgive you?’ She asked with such sincerity, too, that the entire reading went quiet.
What are you reading right now?
Orle Castel-Bloom’s Dolly City (W W Norton) and Susan Choi’s My Education (Short Books). There’s also Victoria de Grazia’s Irresistible Empire (Belknap Press) which I’m reading while I eat breakfast, a page or two a day. Dolly City’s one of the craziest books I’ve read in a long time and de Grazia’s book is one of the smartest.
What was the last book you read and loved?
Probably Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers (Scribe). Talk about an extraordinary document, a bravura act of reportage.
What was the defining book of your childhood?
Hard to say, I read and loved reading so much. Watership Down by Richard Adams and The Lord of the Rings by J R R Tolkien (both various imprints).
Which is your favourite bookstore?
The Montclair Book Center in Montclair NJ. Independent, with an amazing and massive collection of used books. I used to drive up there when I was a teenager and I still go now.
Who would you like to challenge to a literary spat?
Books don’t fight and even if they did books can never ‘beat’ one another—only in the world of the Bible or the Koran is there one book greater and better than all others. In my mind what books seem to do best is argue with each other and the books are the ones to choose their debate partners, not the writers.
Facebook or Twitter?
I don’t do either these days.
If I were a literary character I’d be …
The guy reading who the protagonist speeds past on the train.
In 50 years’ time books will be …
Read.
What’s your favourite thing about being a writer?
All the reading. That fills me with endless joy. Every time I lose hope in myself or in the planet I just read. Such a simple technology and yet the best we have for putting us in touch with another human soul.
Category: Features
