#Metoo - Writer Junot Diaz Responds to Allegations of Sexual Misconduct

[stevenleser]

Too bad - His books were good reads.

https://jezebel.com/writer-junot-diaz-responds-to-allegations-of-sexual-mis-1825781649

“I think about the hurt I’ve caused,” Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Junot Díaz wrote in a #MeToo-inspired essay in the New Yorker. In the widely-celebrated essay, Díaz wrote about his rape at the age of eight and its lingering trauma, including a suicide attempt. “The rape excluded me from manhood, from love, from everything,” he wrote. Díaz also attempted to grapple with “the hurt” he imposed on unnamed others, largely ex-girlfriends, expanding on some of the themes he explored in his 2012 short story collection, This Is How You Lose Her. “I don’t hurt people with my lies or my choices, and wherever I can I make amends,” Díaz wrote in his April New Yorker essay. “I take responsibility. I’ve come to learn that repair is never-ceasing.” Now Díaz fellow writers are calling on his to take responsibility for the “hurt” he alluded to.

On Thursday night, novelist Zinzi Clemmons tweeted that she was “forcibly” kissed by Díaz when she was “a wide-eyed” 26-year-old. Clemmons, whose novel What We Lose earned her recognition from the National Book Foundation, wrote: “As a grad student, I invited Junot Diaz to speak to a workshop on issues of representation in literature. I was an unknown wide-eyed 26 yo, and he used it as an opportunity to corner and forcibly kiss me. I’m far from the only one he’s done this 2, I refuse to be silent anymore.”

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Clemmons’ first tweet was retweeted and elaborated on by writer Carmen Maria Machado whose 2017 story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist for the National Book Award. “During his tour for THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE HER, Junot Díaz did a Q&A at the grad program I’d just graduated from,” Machado wrote on Twitter. “When I made the mistake of asking him a question about his protagonist’s unhealthy, pathological relationship with women, he went off for me for twenty minutes.” In a long thread, Machado recounted her hostile encounter with Díaz, interweaving it with a trenchant critique of the often misogynistic gender politics in his work. She wrote too about the literary community’s complicity, particularly the pervasive underrepresentation of Latinx writers that allows figureheads like Díaz to flourish despite the largely open secret of his treatment of women within publishing.

[stevenleser]

1. Kick for anyone who didnt see the post late last night. nt

[ismnotwasm]

2. This reminds me somehow

Of a story told in the comic book “Preacher” where one of the characters describes dating a writer, who asks her all kinds of very intimate questions about what’s it’s like being a woman, then she finds out the writer uses her answers in a terribly misogynistic horror book.

Good article

[stevenleser]

3. I can understand why. When you read this article, I think one comes away with a feeling of deception

and being deceived by Diaz.

I think those women who are saying that his "Mea Culpa" article was a pre-emptive strike against the MeToo accusations coming out against him are 100% correct.

I also agree with some of the posters who are saying that a forced kiss and some raging assholish rants aren't exactly the same stuff as Cosby, Weinstein and Ailes. However, on the other side of it, I also agree with some of the folks responding to those folks saying someone who does that stuff is likely to have done worse, it may have not yet come out.

[IluvPitties]

4. He's not Cosby or Weinstein, but he needs to do some introspection.

He has issues, obviously. Nobody is perfect, and I hope he can ask for forgiveness honestly and do the work to heal wounds he might have caused.