‘I’m Nobody or I’m a Nation’

What would you say to that?
I'm like, "God, I don't know!" You want to say, "No, no I don't." But you can't tell them until the book is done. So, of course, you're like, "Damn, I hope not!"

Did it ever get you down? Did you feel like, screw it?
Oh, yeah. Talk to my fiancée. No, I think it was an incredibly difficult struggle. I tell a lot of young people I work with that nothing should be more inspirational than my dumb ass. It took me 11 years to struggle through one dumb book, and every day you just want to give up. But you don't find out you're an artist because you do something really well. You find out you're an artist because when you fail you have something within you—strength or belief or just craziness—that picks you back up again. Most of the artists I know will never, fortunately for them, have to face an 11-year hole. Fighting your way out of an 11-year hole is a lot tougher than it might seem. And I think had it not been for, like, that stupid Caribbean immigrant stubbornness that my mom bred into me, my God, I would have actually stayed down.

Where did the idea for the novel come from?
I was in Mexico City, and I was living there, really depressed, trying to figure out how to write something that made any sense, and one of my Mexican friends had picked up a copy of "The Importance of Being Earnest" off his bookshelf and he started talking about how important Oscar Wilde was in his life. And in Spanish it's hard to pronounce "Wilde" without it coming out sounding like "Wao." And I just loved that. I had this incredible vision of this whole family: this fat kid, can't get laid, loves "Star Trek;" his super-athletic, burning-with-rage-towards-her-mother-but-incredibly-forward-looking sister, and then this really [messed]-up mom. They just jumped into my head.

And this is a book where you're borrowing from so many books. It's a book about other books. If it wasn't for the small pleasures, the confidence that you draw from other writers, the courage that you find in other writers' work, it would be hard to continue through these labors.

Do you get frustrated by always being identified as a "Dominican" writer or a "Latino" writer, and never just as a straight-up "writer"?
No, because there's no such thing as a straight-up writer. I think when people say a straight-up writer, what they really mean is a white writer. In other words, historically there has never been this concept of a nonracialized, nongendered writer. The fact that the word "writer" has to be modified so often is because everybody knows that when people speak of writers, we tend to mean, on an unconscious level, white males. And I don't think that being a white writer and being a Dominican writer says anything about your talent with the material that you write about. That's the important difference. People assume that if you put a tag on it, that immediately assumes that you're a different kind of writer. But that's not the case. Just because those of us that write in English in the United States are American writers, that doesn't mean that we really have much in common.

I think that the reason I don't mind being labeled or labeling myself is because I think the entire universe can be found in the Dominican experience. I don't see the Dominican Republic as a limitation. People seem to think that coming from a tiny island with this really bizarre history in the Dominican Republic is somehow limiting. But in my mind, I think that the same way a small, cold, gray, drizzly island nation in the North Atlantic could imagine itself the center of the universe, I see no difference why a Dominican who comes from this tiny little place and time can't also imagine himself the center of the universe.