He writes the way Mondays feel.
The dissociation borne of too many cigarettes, and not enough sleep the night before. The feeling that all this ass-kicking is happening to someone else, when deep down you know it’s happening to you.
I assume most of the tales Diaz tells in Drown, are inspired by actual events. (If not, the man’s more of a master than I thought.) So, I’m sure he’s often lauded – perhaps even patronized a little – for having survived it all to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and professor of creative writing at MIT.
What I really admire him for, however, is not making me so awfully conscious of his accomplishing that survival. He lets context do that. Unlike the Angela’s Ashes of the world, where the pathos of the author’s situation is constantly reinforced by the author himself.