And because love, real love, is not so easily shed.
I was surrounded by a lot of male writers of color who have this incredibly bizarre relationship to masculinity. It’s like we were all mega-nerds but you would never know that if you listened to the way they talk about themselves.
In the end, all worlds, whether they’re set in the future or in New Jersey of today, are fictions. Sure, you don’t got to do too much work to build a mundane world, but don’t get it twisted: you still got to do some work.
In minority communities there’s a sensitivity, often a knee-jerk reaction, to critical representations. There’s a misunderstanding of what an artist does.
My father was a Little League dictator. That really affected me, his control-freakery, his impunity, his arbitrary unreasonable power.
I’m one of those apocalyptics. From the start of my immigrant days, I’ve been fascinated by end-of-the-world stories, by outbreak narratives, and always wanted to set a world-ender on Hispaniola.
Migration gives a blank cheque to put anything you don’t feel like addressing in the memory hold. No neighbours can go against the monster narrative of your family.
My greatest responsibility is to acknowledge the mistakes and the shortcomings of the country in which I live, to acknowledge my privileges, and to try to make it a better place.
My mother took care of us until my father scrammed, and then she ended up working in the small-factory sector of New Jersey with a lot of other immigrants.
I’m just this Dominican kid from New Jersey.
I’m not writing fairy tales or object lessons.
It took me sixteen years to write.
My thing is, I’m just way too harsh. It’s an enormous impediment, and that’s just the truth of it. It doesn’t make me any better, make me any worse, it certainly isn’t more valorous. I have a character defect, man.
Just the fact that you get to live and breathe and interact with the world – that’s pretty marvelous.
I write for the people I grew up with. I took extreme pains for my book to not be a native informant. Not: ‘This is Dominican food. This is a Spanish word.’ I trust my readers, even non-Spanish ones.
I wring my hands because I know that as a dude, my privilege, my long-term deficiencies work against me in writing women, no matter how hard I try and how talented I am.
My father was a trigamist; he supported three families. We were never not poor.
Even if you didn’t come from another country, the idea of how do you make a home somewhere new is common to anyone who’s either going to college, shifting towns.
We hide so well. This is the bottom line: how hidden is male subjectivity? Name five books where male subjectivity is produced in an honest way.
When I became my masked identity I was this incredible little nerd, but in the real world I had to be this tough kid from the neighborhood.