Junot Díaz was inundated with well-earned praise for his 1997 collection Drown . In the ten years since, the Dominican American writer slowly, but surely, finished his first novel. He tantalized fans with a New Yorker excerpt in 2000, but the complete The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao wasn't published until this September. It's a sprawling saga that chronicles one Dominican family's passions and pain, from the parents' lives under the brutal Trujillo regime to their son Oscar's struggles as a "ghetto nerd" in New Jersey. Before reading to a packed bookstore in Oakland, CA, Díaz spoke with Boldtype's Toby Warner about why writers are like dictators, what took him so long, and why he'd love to be caught stealing.

Boldtype: Were you a voracious reader as a kid?

Junot Díaz: For me, writing is an outgrowth of reading. I'm a reader way before I'm a writer. It started when I was a kid because when I read I didn't have an accent. No one could fucking fuck with me, you know? In your head, you sound great. I was convinced that if I read enough, I could erase all the awkwardness of being an immigrant. It took like ten years before I could realize what people were talking about. For the longest time I didn't know what people meant when they were talking about the Who. For real, bro, it's amazing. I used to think that if I read enough it would all become clear. But of course that wasn't true.

BT: It's been nearly 11 years since Drown was published. Did you have to shift down a gear when you started working on a novel?

JD: Honestly, I think the problem was just that I never leave myself the fuck alone. When I was working on Drown, writing was only a small part of my life. It was an escape from that part of me that drove me nuts. It was just this thing I was doing. Nobody was waiting for it. Nobody cared. I was honestly one of the worst kids in my MFA program. When Drown got published, my writing self was suddenly the self that got the emphasis. I know it sounds completely disingenuous but it was just me, man. The book could have sold one copy and no one could have written about it. I would have still turned it up to 11. I kept calling myself out in my head, saying, "You're a fucking fraud, dude, unless you do this." And that's the way I pushed myself. If I was more compassionate and nicer, I probably could have done this in two years. Instead, I'm this major dick to myself. I always say that this book almost had me on the Tobin Bridge in Boston. Thing is, it's not just that it was hard. It's that the book had to be from a voice that was completely joyous. And that was the illest fucking thing. I was torturing myself, but the voice had to be the exact opposite. I'm obsessed with the illusion of the organic. How do you use artifice and craft to give the impression that this is a real person there talking to you?

BT: Did you have to do a lot of research on science fiction, fantasy, and Dominican history to make that kind of illusion possible?

JD: I knew I needed to create Mordor, the realm that all these people sprang from — the Dominican Republic under Trujillo. And I had to create this voice that knew all this fucking crazy shit — history, all the genre stuff. In Yunior, the narrator, I wanted a narrative persona that created the gap between who you are inside, where you tell your stories, and who people think you are. That took some work. You're almost always repressing six or nine narrative strands to create a coherent, non-conflicting, non-kooky self. Yunior the character and Yunior the writer are very, very distinct to get exactly that point across. It's so strange, though, because people forget this. I had somebody tell me, "I don't believe this guy is the one telling the story." And I'm like, that's the fucking point. Have you forgotten what you sound like in your head?

BT: I've read nearly the same criticism in a couple of reviews: that it's not convincing that Yunior, the narrator, is really telling this story, because all of his nerdy knowledge seems at odds with his outward macho persona.

JD: And I love that. Because I thought that was the book. For me, the book is Oz . That's why there are all those references to Zardoz and Oz. In my mind, Yunior acts like the big mask of Oz, but he's really that shrunken little guy behind the fucking curtain. But I think it says a lot about people's expectations of people of color. A lot of this is racialized in ways that are disturbing. A dude who acts tough and gets a bunch of girls can't be a genius inside? It's really fucking bizarre, man. You ever read Miracle Man , the comic book? I always think the human, Western, 21st-century condition is Miracle Man. He's a superhero who's been traumatized by a nuclear explosion, and he's forgotten that he actually has two selves. He sits around pretending he's actually a unified self, but he's actually two different people. I feel like we've all bought into that — well, perhaps not all of us. Not Oscar. He's the exact opposite. Oscar is the mask and the man behind the curtain simultaneously. He simply can't be anyone else. And that's what makes him so incredibly heroic.

BT: A major thread in the novel is the powerful curse that afflicts this family. What lead you to curses as a motif?

JD: You know what it is, man? Power words. Narratives that are so powerful that they can transform your entire being. I always thought that was cool about Captain Marvel . He would say "Shazam!" and his whole organism would change. That's how powerful that word was. But it's the same way when you're a kid. Somebody could call you a word when you're young and forever change your future. You know? You only need a couple words, directed at a person in a very specific, vulnerable time, and they become someone else. For me, curses are almost like a virus. Once someone tells you have a curse in your family, it's hard to avoid that organizing the way that you look at this random universe. Curses were also a really great way to warp between huge, amorphous History and the personal history of this family. The Greeks, the early Hebrews, they understood that. The way you could connect the vast history of the gods and of the nation to the person is through the curse. A curse takes that vast vapor of history and condenses it into a form that we can imbibe.

BT: The narrator of Oscar Wao one-ups Salman Rushdie's claim that writers and dictators are natural enemies by adding that they're also competition. What did you mean by that?

JD: Well, look. Dictatorships don't like fractures. They want to sell you a story that gets rid of all the complexity, gets rid of the very fact that a story's being told. I always felt the same thing with novels. I honestly think we practice the same fucking art, but for totally different purposes. And yet it's very easy to fall to the dark side, even as a writer. I mean, think about it. In the kingdom of my book, I am the ultimate dictator. I give the illusion that this is a world, but that's not true. It's like the way that Trujillo used to give the illusion that Santo Domingo was a healthy, normal society. That's why, in my mind, a book that doesn't give enough room for the reader becomes just another form of a bizarre matrix, a bizarre dictatorship. There's gotta be huge chasms. There's gotta be room for you to resist, for you to play. If I provide you with all the pieces, it's good practice for the dictator who comes along down the road.

BT: What were some of the "gaps" you built into the book? The footnotes?

JD: Sure, they contest the story of the page. Everybody always says, "I hate these footnotes, they jump me off the page." That's the point. This is a book about the terror of the single voice — of the dictatorship — and the footnotes completely undermine that authority. So unlike a lot of the postmodern white boys who use it to reinforce authority, to show their erudition, these footnotes are constantly undermining it. They jump in to give you some nonsense gossip or to say, "I got that thing in the first chapter wrong... oops!" But there's also Oscar himself. Fact is, among all these multiple voices, Oscar never really appears. We never encounter any of his direct words, and only at the very end do we get a letter from him. He's as big a ghost as his vanished ancestors, but the voice distracts you from that. It's a book about what happens when you are vaporized. Can you exist again? Can we use language to bring back what is gone? There's all these "Dr. Manhattan" jokes because in Watchmen , Dr. Manhattan is a vanished man. He pieces himself together again, but he's not human. When he reconstructs himself, an element is fucking missing. You know? And it's the same thing with Yunior and Oscar: no matter how hard he tries, something is missing. This book is not attempting to give you a real fucking human. It's attempting to give you Dr. Manhattan — this blue, ethereal ghost. In a way, that's as close as we can come as artists to representing the human. We can put the experience together, but it always comes up short.

BT: Speaking of guides, you begin with an epigraph from Derek Wolcott, and the book is riddled with citations and allusions to other authors. What other writers were you in dialogue with? What books on your shelves had some influence on Oscar?

JD: Well, there's so much unconscious absorption of material. But in my mind I was really thinking a lot about Alan Moore. Also Pedro Mir, who's a Dominican poet who wrote about what it means to be part of a nation when you've spent your whole life outside of it. I thought a lot about Patrick Chamoiseau, who was a huge influence. He was the one who taught me how to fucking write this book. I completely hijacked his footnoting style. He's a Caribbeanist, so he doesn't use footnotes to engage in "look how clever I am" stuff. He uses them to fuss with his primary voice.

BT: He does that in Texaco , right?

JD: Yeah, Texaco is the most incredible fucking book. That's where I learned that whole technique. It just shows how poorly read we are that no critic has actually gone and said "Yo, this dude is not only stealing his footnote style from Texaco, but he's even saying in the footnotes that he's doing it." There's all these shout-outs to Texaco in the book. Being a Caribbean writer, I'm the only kind of thief who wants to get caught. You know? Because it encourages people to read. I don't want it to be cryptic; I want it to lead people to other books.

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