A surprising theme that has emerged over the last couple of days is the number of authors who have had negative experiences from their fathers. We 
have already mentioned the personal stories of Heather O’Neill and John Burnside, and tonight we heard from Junot Diaz a Dominican-American writer. Junot moved to the US with his parents when he was 6, where they settled in New Jersey. What his biographical notes don’t mention, but Guy Somerset, the chairperson of his session did, is that Junot’s father maintained a family in America when he moved there to work and raise money to support his family in the Dominican Republic. “Yes, my father was a bigamist” Junot admitted, after a pause, when he added, “clearly I didn’t think we’d be talking about this”. His father was “brutal and a perfectionist”, which lead Junot to make his own “hellish standards” for himself. The influence of his father is possibly what is behind his belief that to be a successful writer ”requests that we become people”. By this he means writers need to have a deep humanity to leave aside their prejudice, narrow-mindedness, and their baggage. Junot descibes it as the need to “grow the f***-up”.
On the subject of his fondness for the ”f-word”: Junot said his sister told him neither he nor his only novel, the Pulitzer Prize winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, would ever be endorsed by Oprah. 1) he swears too much, 2) there’s too much swearing in his book, and 3) there’s anal sex in his book. No, not the sort of book Oprah would go for.
When asked whether Pulitzer Prize winners can give up their day jobs, Junot replied you get US$10,000 of which $4,000 goes in taxes. That leaves him $6,000 and as his mother reminded him, spread that over the 11 years it took to write the novel….
This session was a highlight for me. Junot Diaz is a wonderful mix – intelligent, highly irreverant, self-effacing, humble, well-read in NZ authors and as a 13 year old obsessed about NZ and the movie The Edge of Darkness, honest (“I’m probably just too grumpy”), gentle, and a writer who admits he could survive without writing, but couldn’t survive without reading. I hope it’s not another 11 years before his next novel comes out.
