In the Sandbox: An Interview With Junot Díaz

• The Tech: You’ve said that your father had a library in the basement that showed you that reading could be masculine. I never thought of it as special to any gender in particular — in your culture, does everything have to be either masculine or feminine?
• Junot Diaz: In my culture? You mean our culture? Are you trying to tell me that reading and intellectual activity isn’t feminized in the U.S.? At a cultural level? That gender doesn’t infect nearly all our thinking in this, our society? These false binaries between masculine and feminine [are] not something that I invented nor something that’s exclusively “Dominican.” I might just happen to be more aware of these things but that doesn’t mean that we’re not all in the same sandbox.