Just finished reading Díaz’s This is How You Lose Her. I’d read the extracts in The New Yorker two years ago (ok, yes, am a little slow to get to things sometimes. Life’s been a bit, ah, jammed).
Raw, hilarious, excruciatingly piquant stories of relationships lost. Díaz’s prose is so damn alive.
The last story ends with Yunior, Díaz’s alter ego, throwing himself into his work, just trying to move on.
“You bend to the work because it feels like hope, like grace,” he says.
That is all we can do, often as not. Tuck our heads down. Work, hard. And push forward. Or what feels like forward. It is in this pure effort when all seems lost and stripped away that a space for grace may, just may, open.
But there is no formula. We have no control. No checklist of stuff to do in order to get from A to B to C to Grace. Just have got to bow to it.
[…] of the equation, a large swath of my heart remained on pause. Throwing myself into work, like the Junot Díaz line, because in the midst of everything else out of my control (that would be just about […]