Fifteen Questions with Junot Díaz

Junot Daz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Drown, meets me in front of the Harvard Bookstore. Its 9 a.m. on a Friday, and the early September humidity is just beginning to spike. Daz is wearing a mottled red t-shirt, dark grey jeans, running shoes, and a Boston Red Sox cap. He kisses me on both cheeks when we meet. Recovering from back surgery, Daz finds sitting almost impossible so we begin walking down Bow Street towards the Charles River.

Fifteen Minutes: You did an interview with The New York Times recently and talked about many of your favorite books. Its an impressive listhow do you find time to read all of those authors?

Junot Daz: You have to understand: Its what I do. When something is really important to you, I think youre always looking for an excuse. I find reading more important to me than almost anything, including my writing. I consider myself a reader way more than I consider myself a writer. Perhaps what might have struck anybody about that interview was that this quantity of reading is more emblematic of the way I organize my life than anything.

FM: Did you read anything before we met this morning?

JD: Before I came here I read a chapter of a book on invasive species while I had my damn oatmeal, and I said, I could have my fucking oatmeal and just chill. Or, I could put in 25 pages. And so 25 pages are done. The book will be done by this evening because I sort of use these still, interstitial moments to burn through them. My favorite line of the chapter was the last line: It is unlikely that anyone will ever again enter New Zealand carrying a red deer.

FM: Theres one line that really struck me from a short story you wrote titled The Cheaters Guide to Love. The line was: The half-life of love is forever. Can you explain that to me?

JD: I think you discover somethingperhaps some of us discover it young, perhaps some of us discover it much older. You can get over a person romantically and never fall out of love with them. As a young person I had no idea that that was possible. I always thought that eventually a relationship would come to end, and your imaginary would find in time surcease. But I think when you really fall in love, there seems to be something permanent that happens to you.

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Fifteen Questions with Junot Díaz