Author of the week: Junot Díaz

last updated 8 January 2015

Junot Díaz didn’t exactly enjoy writing his new short story collection, said Boris Kachka in New York magazine. Though he’d recently been awarded a Pulitzer for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the New Jersey–raised writer was also getting over a breakup with his fiancée when he turned to the project in earnest. As you might guess from the book’s title, This Is How You Lose Her, Díaz poured his heartache into the new stories, which feature his longtime literary alter ego, a Dominican-American named Yunior. In one, Yunior laments a relationship lost because of his philandering. Díaz admits to having cheated on various girlfriends himself, but says that in the case of his fiancée, he “committed the most unpardonable sin, which is that I made her unhappy.”

Díaz did derive some enjoyment from creating the new stories,said Cressida Leyshon in NewYorker.com. A younger Yunior held center stage in Díaz’s acclaimed 1996 debut collection, Drown, and the author found it rewarding to reunite with the character. As Díaz was when he won the 2008 Pulitzer, Yunior is entering his 40s in This Is How You Lose Her—a time of regrets, the author says, but also a time when illusions fade. Díaz says he’s spent much of his life waiting for “a point when my immigrant-ness would suddenly fall away and I would miraculously become an American.” He now realizes that won’t happen, which suits him fine. “Ain’t a bad fate, to belong to two worlds.”